Stripe and Advent reportedly bid more than $53B for PayPal
Reuters says Stripe and Advent made an offer for PayPal, a deal that would dwarf the fintech’s prior acquisitions and test private-company M&A capacity.
By Ingrid Halvorsen · Venture Capital Reporter
· 3 min read
Stripe and Advent International have made an offer to acquire PayPal in a transaction valued at more than $53 billion, Reuters reported Wednesday, citing sources. If completed, the deal would be far larger than any known acquisition in Stripe’s history and would put a privately held fintech company in the unusual position of buying a public payments incumbent.
The reported bid has been discussed in the market for months, according to Reuters. No completed transaction has been announced. The reported value alone makes the situation notable: venture-backed private companies rarely have the cash, stock currency and borrowing capacity needed to absorb listed companies at this scale.
Stripe is an exception among private companies, though not an unlimited one. The payments company said in February that it had arranged investor deals to provide liquidity to current and former employees through a tender offer at a $159 billion valuation. Crunchbase ranks that valuation as the fourth-highest among startups globally, behind AI labs Anthropic and OpenAI among the companies that have surpassed it on that measure.
Crunchbase data shows Stripe has raised about $10.4 billion since it was founded in 2010. It has also been one of the more active acquirers among venture-backed startups, with 21 known acquisitions. Only three have publicly disclosed prices: stablecoin platform Bridge at $1.1 billion in 2025, usage-based billing company Metronome at $1 billion in 2026 and Nigerian payments company Paystack at $200 million in 2020.
Stripe’s acquisition activity has accelerated since 2020. Crunchbase data shows 13 of its 21 known deals were announced from 2020 onward. That shift matters because the targets point to where Stripe has been adding product surface area outside its core payments processing business.
Recent purchases have included crypto and stablecoin infrastructure companies such as Bridge, Privy, Valora and PartyDAO. Stripe has also bought companies tied to billing and money movement, including Metronome, Lemon Squeezy and Orum. The company’s public M&A record shows a pattern of buying infrastructure and workflow products around the payments stack, rather than making a balance-sheet transaction remotely comparable to PayPal.
A PayPal acquisition would change that pattern. PayPal remains one of the best-known names in digital payments, and a deal at more than $53 billion would give Stripe a much broader footprint in a crowded sector that includes processors, checkout companies, wallets and enterprise payments platforms. The structure, financing and regulatory path for such a transaction were not detailed in the reported offer.
At the reported price, a PayPal deal would also rank among the largest U.S. technology acquisitions of the past five years, according to Crunchbase data. Larger transactions in that period include the $61 billion VMware and Broadcom deal in 2022 and SpaceX’s reported $60 billion acquisition last month of AI coding platform Cursor and parent company Anysphere.
For Stripe, the reported PayPal bid would be a move from frequent bolt-on M&A into one of the largest technology deals of the current cycle. For the payments industry, it would put consolidation pressure back at the center of a market where scale, distribution and infrastructure depth remain the main competitive advantages.
This story draws on original reporting from Crunchbase News.
