The possibility of payments giant Stripe going public drew headlines in January of 2023. More than a year and a half later, the company is still private.

Talk of a potential IPO among investors and employees goes back even further than that, said Steve Klebe, who was Stripe’s head of enterprise payments performance until 2022 and is now a freelance consultant and Stripe investor.

“This notion of [Stripe] going public has been germinating for years,” he said.

And yet, investors and employees still await an IPO announcement from Stripe, which has dual headquarters in San Francisco and Dublin. 

Journalists have questioned executives of the payments firm and early investors are no doubt pressuring President John Collison for a return on their investment, but Stripe has provided little clarity on whether or not an initial public offering is in the works.

When asked about an IPO in an interview this month with the news outlet Bloomberg, Collison demurred. “Presumably at some stage,” he told a podcast host in an interview posted Wednesday.

However, the company's actions are louder and more clear than its public equivocation, analysts and industry insiders say.

They see signs that the payments firm — which offers payments software to merchants — is gearing up for an IPO. One of the fastest ways to give early backers a return on their investment is an infusion of cash from selling shares to the public.

Collison’s evasiveness fits a pattern in Stripe’s public statements.

In January of 2023, CNBC reported co-founders John and Patrick Collison — who are brothers — told employees they were planning to either take the company public within the next year or let employees sell their shares. That timeline elapsed with no IPO announcement, and in March John Collison said in an interview with Fortune that they have "no news to share” about an initial public offering.

"When it’s time to share, we’ll share it," he told the magazine.

While executives won’t confirm it’s going public, insiders like Klebe say the company has offered clues.

In fact, Stripe is already acting like a public company in some respects, Klebe said.

Stripe, for example, published letters outlining its financial performance for 2022 and 2023. Stripe surpassed $1 trillion in payment volume for the first time in 2023, a 25% increase compared to 2022, the firm wrote in the second of those letters, which is addressed to the "Stripe community" and was released in March.

The letter does not reveal the company’s net income but said Stripe was cash flow positive in 2023. As a privately held company, it is under no obligation to release that information.

“They've been fairly open about their performance and results,” Klebe said.

A Stripe spokesperson declined to comment on the record.

Other hints have seeped through Stripe’s tight filter in the form of news reports and public announcements.

The venture capital firm Sequoia Capital confirmed in July that it valued Stripe at $70 billion when it was considering buying shares from investors.

Sequoia is one of Stripe's major investors, Collison said in his interview with Bloomberg. A Sequoia spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment.

In March of 2023, Stripe announced it would move forward with a private funding round intended to raise $6.5 billion, at $50 per share.

Then in February of this year, Stripe said it would provide $65 billion in liquidity to employees through a tender offer.

The Silicon Valley techtrade publication The Information reported on another tender offer in August intended to buy back employee stock.

Even as news reports suggest the company is gearing up to go public, Stripe probably isn't in a hurry, especially not in a volatile election year, said Glen Anderson, co-founder of the investment bank Rainmaker Securities.

“Stripe can IPO any time they want, but they don't need the cash, and they're in no rush,” he said, although he stressed he has no inside information.

Executives from private companies considering an initial public offering often tour the country to pitch potential investors in what is known as a roadshow. Anderson said he's seen no indication of Stripe planning such a move.

“If they were out doing a roadshow, the word would get out pretty quickly,” he said. 

For now, the company sees advantages in staying private, Collison told Bloomberg.

“Culturally we’ve ended up in a world where public companies are suited for the extract stage rather than the expand stage,” he said. “Stripe is still growing very quickly and investing in new products.”

Stripe’s apparent lack of urgency doesn’t mean the company isn’t feeling some heat, Anderson said. An IPO is a good way to help pay off early investors who are probably clamoring for a payday, he said.

“This company has been private for years,” Anderson said. “There’s a lot of pent-up demand for liquidity from early investors.”

While Stripe has released details about its performance once a year for the past two years, it would be required to update investors at least once a quarter if it were public, and provide much more granular detail about its earnings and financial health, Klebe said.

“Any reservation somebody might have had about doing business with you might evaporate once you're a public company,” he said.

An IPO mostly benefits early investors, including employees of the company, said Lin William Cong, a university professor who is the founding director of the Fintech Initiative at Cornell.

“Public capital can also be significantly larger [than private investment] which allows the business to grow and expand,” he said.

Nonetheless, going public can be complicated, Cong said. It would “alter its governance structure, depending on how the voting rights are designed,” he said. “Regulation and monitoring will heighten too.”

Stripe has options to provide liquidity to investors beyond an IPO, one of which is a stock buyback, said James Stevens, a partner at the law firm Troutman Pepper who works with fintech companies. But "that takes away money that could be deployed back into the business," he said.

Selling Stripe — or at least a portion of it — is another option, Stevens said, but "Stripe has been growing at a tremendous rate and is very successful, and that might not be something they are interested in.”

By Patrick Cooley on Sep 24, 2024
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