Fintech: What does Stripe at $160B mean for traditional IPOs?
The rise of private markets cast a shadow on traditional Fintech exits
Hi Fintech Futurists —
In the past two weeks, payments giant Stripe announced a tender offer valuing the company at $159B, while fintech infrastructure provider Plaid completed one at $8B. Days later, Robinhood listed its Ventures Fund I on the NYSE, giving retail investors direct exposure to a basket of private companies.
These events are connected.
They reflect a structural shift in how companies access capital, provide liquidity, and eventually think about going public. This week we dig into the continued growth of private markets, why companies are staying private for longer, the emerging risks in the space, and what the road ahead looks like for IPOs.
Today’s agenda below.
FINTECH: What does Stripe at $159B mean for traditional IPOs?
ANALYSIS: $6T Morgan Stanley vs. $40B Kraken; AI Layoffs Hit Fintech (link here)
CURATED UPDATES: Paytech, Neobanks, Lending, Digital Investing
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What does Stripe at $159B mean for traditional IPOs?
Let’s start with Plaid.
The company was founded in 2013 as an infrastructure layer connecting consumer bank accounts to financial applications like Venmo, Robinhood, and Chime. Apps pay Plaid to let users seamlessly connect their bank, authenticate credentials, and share account information. This is particularly valuable in the US, where regulation does not mandate banks to share information to third parties (like Open Banking in the UK and PSD2 in the EU).
In fact, half of all Americans have reportedly used Plaid’s services indirectly through various financial applications. The company peaked at a $13.4B valuation in 2021 and was at one point set to be acquired by Visa for $5.3B before regulators blocked the deal. After repricing to $6.1B in April 2025, its latest tender offer at $8B reflects renewed momentum. Revenue of $430MM projected for 2025 and 20% of new customers now AI companies.
Stripe meanwhile is a payments service giant founded in 2010 by brothers John and Patrick Collison.
Riding a decade of exponential growth in e-commerce, the firm recently reported monser results for 2025. Payments volume totalled $1.9T, up 34% YoY, and equivalent to roughly 1.6% of global GDP. Revenue isn’t disclosed but sources estimate at least $5B in 2024. Today, Stripe’s Revenue suite alone (comprising Stripe Billing, Invoicing, Tax, and more) is on track to hit an annual run rate of $1 billion.
Beyond payments, Stripe has positioned aggressively around crypto and agentic commerce as a catalyst for online spend. It acquired stablecoin orchestration platform Bridge for $1.1B, wallet infrastructure provider Privy, and is building Tempo, a payments-focused L1 blockchain being tested by Visa, Nubank, and Klarna. Its latest tender offer at $159B is a 74% increase from last year.
A tender offer is a type of secondary transaction that enables new or existing investors to purchase shares directly from employees and earlier shareholders. It provides liquidity without diluting the company or subjecting it to the regulatory and structural burden of an IPO.
Both Stripe and Plaid are part of a broader trend of companies successfully side-stepping public markets in favour of private transactions. Anthropic is reportedly exploring a tender offer at a valuation north of $350B and Revolut recently completed an employee sale at $75B.
In 2025, private secondary volumes surged to $240B, up from $162B in 2024. This compares to about $140B raised via traditional IPOs globally.
With private capital markets flourishing, companies have been slower to come to market. Companies now wait an average of 16 years before going public, 33% longer than a decade ago, and total private market assets have more than doubled to $22T over the past 12 years. Some of the most valuable companies in the world including SpaceX and OpenAI are remaining private, with valuations that rival or exceed large-caps.
This has led to two key market developments.
The first is the birth of a new layer of capital markets infrastructure. We recently analysed the emergence of platforms like Forge and EquityZen that facilitate secondary trading of private company shares. Charles Schwab acquired Forge for $660M in November and Morgan Stanley picked up EquityZen for an undisclosed sum back in October. You can read more on this below.
The second is private markets opening up to retail investors. Robinhood’s new Ventures Fund I, which listed last Friday on the NYSE raised $658M and holds stakes in large-cap private companies including Ramp, Stripe, Revolut. This is not a first-of-its-kind. Destiny Tech100 listed in March 2024 and offers 100 venture-backed companies, including SpaceX and OpenAI. But Robinhood can distribute directly to 28MM users and, just like with public equities, it has a track record of popularising asset classes historically reserved for institutional investors.
On top of this, the Trump administration signed an executive order last Summer that paves the way for the $8.7T in 401(k) retirement accounts to invest in alternative assets including cryptocurrencies and private markets.
We see these as major catalysts for further growth but they also surface several hidden risks.
Among them is the structural complexity behind purchasing a share of private stock. Brokers typically package these into their own SPVs with fees, which sometimes themselves hold positions in other vehicles.
These layers of counterparty risk and fees can obscure what investors actually own. The next macro downturn will feature the unwinding of SPV positions and subsequent lawsuits.
There is also the problem of valuation opacity. Private company valuations are typically anchored to the most recent funding round, which may happen once or twice a year. This limits price discovery and creates a gap between reported net asset values and what public markets are willing to pay. The FT recently reported how Robinhood’s Ventures Fund I also fell 11% on its first day of trading. Meanwhile, Destiny Tech 100 traded at nearly 20x its NAV at one point. This unpredictability is not exactly great for a retirement savings account.
Regulators are meanwhile beginning to push for reforms to make public markets more attractive. SEC commissioner Hester Peirce echoed concerns around private markets in her February speech. Companies face less pressure to go public but private markets lack the equivalent price discovery, accessibility, and liquidity. SEC Chairman Paul Atkins recently outlined a three-pillar plan to “make IPOs great again” (his words, not ours) by easing disclosure requirements and reforming securities litigation. Whether these reforms materialise is still to be determined.
Private deals aside, IPOs did rebound significantly in 2025. Eleven VC-backed fintech companies went public including Circle and Klarna, and more are on the way. Kraken and Bitgo filed confidentially while firms like Ramp and Gusto have either cleaned up cap tables, hired new CFOs, or engaged investment banks. F-Prime estimates total fintech market cap could grow from $947B to $1.2T.
Whether these companies achieve the price they want is another question. By year-end, only two of the eleven traded above their IPO price. Chime, once valued at $25B privately, listed at $13.5B. Klarna went public at $17.3B but ended the year at $10.9B.
With growing geopolitical tensions and uncertain macro, the firms still on the sidelines may find the tender offer playbook to be the path of least resistance. Certainly there is still enough private liquidity to absorb the supply of unicorn companies.
👑 Related Coverage 👑
Long Take: $6T Morgan Stanley vs. $40B Kraken; AI Layoffs Hit Fintech
We look at 2 burning topics:
Intelligently Artificial Employment: We analyze Block’s decision to cut roughly 40% of its workforce under the banner of AI productivity, placing the move in the broader context of tech’s cyclical restructuring.
Wall Street vs. Crypto Street: We examine the regulatory convergence between Wall Street incumbents and scaled crypto platforms, highlighted by Morgan Stanley’s OCC filing for a national trust bank to custody BTC, ETH, and SOL, and Kraken Financial securing a Federal Reserve master account via its Wyoming SPDI charter.
We argue that these parallel regulatory milestones signal a structural merging of traditional finance and crypto rails, with fiduciary-grade crypto custody likely to compress spreads and reshape competitive dynamics.
Curated Updates
Here are the rest of the updates hitting our radar.
Paytech
⭐ Payments Processor Stripe Expresses Interest in PayPal -Bloomberg
Meta is planning stablecoin comeback - Coindesk
Kraken becomes first crypto company to secure Fed master account - Coindesk Magazine
Mastercard unveils trust layer for agentic commerce - Fintextra
Neobanks
Stablecoin Payments Firm KAST Raises $80 Million in Funding - Bloomberg
Latin American neobank Ualá raises $195 million at $3.2 billion - Finextra
London’s Allica Bank reaches unicorn status after $155m raise - Silicon Republic
Lending
Block to lay off 4000 employees as the AI era arrives - Finextra
Revolut Applies for U.S. Bank License in Expansion Push - Banking Dive
US regional banks build tokenised deposit network - Finextra
Digital Investing
⭐Nasdaq Partners With Kraken in Plan for 24/7 Tokenized Stock Trading - WSJ
Robinhood targets wealthy customers with new Platinum credit card - Reuters
Northern Trust launches tokenised money market share class - Finextra
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Stripe is impressive , have to pay respect to the brothers vision
The Robinhood Ventures Fund I discount on day one is the tell. When public markets immediately reprice private NAVs downward, it confirms what the tender offer boom has been obscuring: price discovery is broken, not solved. The 401(k) access question makes this more urgent, not less. Who absorbs the basis risk when that unwind comes?