Stripe’s top executives observe a “growing advantage” of remaining a privately held company, they said in a letter to investors last week.

This year marked the start of what Stripe executives called “a large inflection in long-run trends,” fueled by artificial intelligence, wrote John and Patrick Collison, the Irish brothers who co-founded Stripe in 2010 and still lead it. 

Being a private company offers “a growing advantage as we venture into the vicissitudes” of this era, they wrote on Wednesday. The letter was also signed by Will Gaybrick, Stripe’s president of technology and business. Patrick Collison is the company’s chief executive and John Collison is its president. 

A Stripe spokesperson on Thursday confirmed the authenticity of the letter, which was first reported by Axios, the newsletter publisher.

Stripe sells payment processing software and hardware, subscription services and tools for businesses to operate their finance functions. The company serves about 5 million businesses, including retail giant Amazon; online commerce company Shopify; and Rivian, the electric truck maker.

Stripe wrote the letter to its investors the same day the payments player announced its “largest-ever acquisition” of OpenRouter, a New York-based startup that helps companies direct their AI work needs to various providers and manage their AI spending.

“The world is becoming harder to predict and we expect that deft helmsmanship will be required of every company,” they wrote. “We’re fortunate to have a corporate structure that helps us steer the right long-term course.”

In January, John Collison told Bloomberg that Stripe was “still not in any rush” to pursue a public offering. “It’s very early for us,” he said in a television interview, when asked about whether he and his brother still debate a public stock offering. 

A Stripe spokesperson declined to comment Thursday on how the company views a future public stock offering. In February, Stripe made a tender offer to acquire employees’ shares, an exercise that valued the company at $159 billion.

“Genuinely, it is the fastest time in our industry that I have felt, period, since we started Stripe,” John Collison said, citing the rise of agentic commerce and growing stablecoin use. “We have tons of product transformation, product investment to do, and the (capital) table of a company does not change the intrinsic value of the business. We’re just focused on running the business.”

In September 2024, John Collison said in a Bloomberg podcast discussion that the company would consider an IPO “presumably, at some stage.”

As Stripe processes $2 trillion of annual payment volume, or about 2% of global economic activity, the company’s actions and comments “are key to monitor,” TD Cowen analyst Bryan Bergin wrote Thursday in a client note.

“Some of Stripe’s fastest growing businesses increasingly sit outside core payment processing,” Bergin wrote. “We view this as further validation that software, data, treasury, fraud, identity, and other services are becoming increasingly important sources of value creation across payments.”

Stripe enjoys more flexibility around its M&A activity because it is private, Bergin said Friday in an email. “The fact that a private company like Stripe is not persistently in the public eye via quarterly reporting affords it more flexibility to take long-term strategic actions around M&A that may not payoff immediately (or be very costly in the near term), but can ultimately be very successful choice for long-term growth and differentiation,” he wrote.

Stripe, which has dual headquarters in Dublin and south San Francisco, California, did not disclose how much it’s paying for OpenRouter. The New York Times reported the sale price as $7.5 billion, citing an unnamed person with knowledge of the agreement. 

Stripe bought stablecoin platform Bridge in October 2024, paying $1.1 billion, Forbes and other media outlets reported at the time. It followed the Bridge acquisition with Privy, a New York-based cryptocurrency digital wallet startup in June 2025, and Metronome, a San Francisco-based usage-based billing tech company six months later.

The company has also reportedly joined with Advent International, a Boston-based private equity firm, to consider an acquisition of PayPal Holdings, Reuters reported last month. Spokespeople for Stripe, PayPal and Advent have declined to comment in the past.

In any case, it’s clear from the Stripe executives’ recent missive that they intend to keep expanding to build their digital footprint in commerce.

“It’s become evident to us that building economic infrastructure for the internet is mostly the same thing as building the economic infrastructure for AI,” the Stripe executives wrote.