SAN FRANCISCO – stripesthe San Francisco-based payments provider and one of the world’s most valuable private startups, this week hired Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan Chase to advise the company on a possible IPO next year, two people familiar with the matter said.
If a listing goes ahead, Stripe’s public debut would be one of the largest and most anticipated in its class of startups, and could potentially reopen dying public markets to new offerings.
Stripe told employees Thursday it was considering multiple avenues to provide its shareholders with a payout within the next 12 months, the people said. Possible avenues include a direct listing, where the company would publicly list its shares but not issue new ones; a takeover bid in which it would sell employee shares to outside investors but not go public; or a regular IPO, people said.
The information reported earlier about Stripe’s plans.
Investors valued Stripe, which brothers John and Patrick Collison founded in 2010, at $95 billion in 2021 lowered its internal rating by 28 percent to $74 billion and laid off 14 percent of its workforce, or just over 1,000 employees.
The company, which sells payment processing software to the likes of Peloton, Wayfair and Amazon, has postponed opening up public markets. But early investors, who are sitting on huge returns, and employees, some of whose shares are about to expire, are keen to capitalize on the company’s success.
Stripe has raised more than $2 billion from investors including Sequoia Capital, General Catalyst, Founders Fund, Thrive Capital and Andreessen Horowitz.
Market watchers often look to Stripe’s performance as an indicator of the overall health of the startup market, as the company initially served other startups before expanding to larger clients.
Like many tech companies, Stripe spent the last year backing down from its overly optimistic growth plans in the face of a slowing economy. “We have been far too optimistic about the short-term growth of the internet economy,” Patrick Collison wrote in a note to employees announcing layoffs in November.
