On Tuesday, July 14th after the market close Stripe and private equity firm Advent International submitted a joint offer to acquire PayPal for $60.50 per share, valuing the company at $53 billion. The bid represents a 28% premium to PayPal’s Tuesday closing price and is supported by approximately $50 billion in committed bank financing. Stripe and Advent would own PayPal jointly on an equal basis, but PayPal has not responded and there is no certainty a deal will be completed. Stripe’s offer appears to be a preemptive attempt to acquire PayPal’s large consumer base at a discounted valuation, and it may not be accepted.
Let us explain.
At 7 times EBITDA, the price sits below the typical 8x–12x median multiple for payments companies, according to Alvarez & Marsal. The offer appears to be an opening move rather than a final proposal. While the company has faced significant headwinds from the post-pandemic fintech valuation reset, intensifying competition from Stripe and Apple Pay, and a fragmented technology stack resulting from past acquisitions, it remains a leading online payment processor. It had 430 million global active users and generated $1.8 trillion in gross payment volume last year.
Turnaround or turn down?
New CEO Enrique Lores, the former HP CEO, took the reins in March after PayPal issued a profit warning. The company blamed the poor outlook on sputtering growth from its key branded-checkout product, which lets customers use PayPal when making online purchases, and poor internal execution. Lores has said he thinks PayPal has underinvested in its technology platform and is falling behind other financial services companies. He wants to cut down on what he sees as unnecessary layers of the business to spend more on AI and regain a technology leadership position.
He reorganized PayPal into three operating units: Checkout, Consumer Financial Services & Venmo, and Payments & Crypto. He also outlined plans to cut at least $1.5 billion in costs and potentially 20% of its staff over the next two to three years. But it is not all doom and gloom: In the first quarter, PayPal posted revenue of $8.35 billion, up 7% year-over-year and ahead of expectations, with total payment volume rising 8% to $464 billion.
What is the attraction?
A Stripe-PayPal combination would create one of the world’s largest online payments platforms, with $3.7 trillion in annual payment volume. The strategic appeal lies in the strong synergies of the two businesses: Stripe is heavily focused on merchants, while PayPal brings hundreds of millions consumer accounts, direct consumer payment, and banking relationships, the Venmo peer-to-peer network, and a widely used consumer-facing checkout button. The deal would give Stripe immediate access to a large consumer user base and accelerate its efforts to build a digital wallet offering. It would also allow more transactions to flow through Stripe’s own network rather than relying on external processors such as Visa and Mastercard, potentially helping the combined company bypass some transaction fees and capture more value per payment. Additionally, the acquisition would strengthen Stripe’s stablecoin ambitions by providing a vast consumer distribution network to drive broader adoption of stablecoin-based payments. Stripe has already invested significantly in this area through its crypto infrastructure company, Bridge.
Our observations.
In our July 4, 2026, newsletter, we described the announcement of Open USD (OUSD) by the Open Standard consortium, led by Zach Abrams, co-founder of Bridge, the Stripe-owned company. Designed for global money movement, the new stablecoin is backed by more than 140 companies and is expected to launch later this year. A business-focused OUSD could tap PayPal’s approximately thirty-six million business customers worldwide, giving it an immediate audience and practical use case. Because distribution is one of the biggest hurdles for any new payment medium, Stripe may be positioning itself to solve that challenge directly.
Please visit our growing library of FinTech/Payment articles. For example:
On June 14th, 2026, we wrote: “Stripe is a large, privately held, US based, global fintech company and payments infrastructure provider. Its core innovation was being the first to build an institutional-grade, developer-centric, and fully programmable payments platform. This allowed companies to create highly customizable, seamless payment experiences directly within their own products. At the time of Stripe’s founding in 2010, most existing payment solutions were rigid, siloed, and difficult to modify. Stripe changed this by giving businesses the tools and flexibility to quickly implement payments their own way. Today, Stripe powers 50% of the Fortune 500 for a world-class customer base of Amazon, Shopify, Google, OpenAI, Anthropic, NVIDIA, Uber, Ford, Marriott, and Coinbase to name a few….
We think Stripe is best described as a full-stack all-in-one financial OS. It functions as both a payment gateway and a payment processor, while also acting as an acquirer in many cases and offering orchestration capabilities on top. It removes complexity by bundling gateway, processor, orchestration, and tools into one platform, which is why it feels so different from older, fragmented solutions.
Stripe stands out in the crowded payments space primarily through its developer-first philosophy, deep customization capabilities, and unified financial infrastructure platform. While competitors offer solid processing, Stripe treats payments as programmable software rather than a rigid service. Its organizational approach blends functional expertise (heavy emphasis on engineering) with product-focused teams, allowing rapid iteration across a broad ecosystem serving over five million businesses.”
On May 31, 2026, we wrote: ”PayPal Holdings is a global fintech company that operates a two-sided digital payments platform, enabling consumers and merchants to send, receive, and manage money online and in-person. Founded in 1998 (originally as Confinity, later merged with X.com), it became eBay’s primary payment provider before spinning off as an independent public company in 2015. Annual revenues are $32 billion from 440 million active global accounts (consumers and businesses) which generate $1.8 trillion in payment value on twenty-five billion transactions.
The company makes money through transaction fees charged to merchants and consumers (a percentage of the payment volume plus fixed fees). Additional revenue comes from: Currency conversion and cross-border fees, value-added services (e.g., partnerships, subscriptions, gateway fees), interest on customer balances and loans, crypto buying/selling and consumer financing products.
PayPal is best known for enabling payment at checkout for e-commerce, peer-to-peer payments (via Venmo), and in-store payments. Visible brands include PayPal, Venmo, Zettle (point-of-sale), and Honey (shopping rewards).”
Stripe valuation.
Privately held Stripe was valued at $159 billion in February. Its largest prior acquisitions were Bridge for $1.1 billion in October 2024 and Metronome for $1 billion in December 2025. For Advent, a Boston-based firm with more than $90 billion under management, the transaction would build on its earlier payments experience, including its 2010 acquisition of Worldpay. The proposed deal would add to recent M&A activity across the global payments sector as companies pursue greater scale.
