This IPO has been brewing for quite some time now, as speculation for Stripes going public goes back all the way from mid-2020. After raising over $600 million in equity from institutional investors, the company’s total valuation has recently reached $95 million. Is it time to get excited and prepare ammunition for what is claimed to become one of the biggest IPOs in history?
What is Stripe?
Put simply, Stripe is a payment technology company with many divisions whose first goal is to remove the financial complexity behind a startup or a public company. Furthermore, Stripe is a SaaS company, short for Software as a Service company. Their headquarters are located in San Francisco (US), and in Dublin (Ireland).
With Stripe’s software, businesses of any size can accept payments and focus on the business at hand without worrying about the following:
- Financing with Stripe Capital, Stripe only takes a one-time cut with no added interest, which is taken out automatically from the top of your sales until the full amount is repaid.
- Payment APIs that are easy to integrate, easily scalable, and will allow your company to capture more money in the long run.
- Invoicing is easier than ever as it automatically takes care of multicurrency payments, taxes (VAT), and can be automated for a faster payment process.
How much Stripe is worth in 2021?
After its series H funding round, the company was valued at $95 billion. An outstanding result from the Irish company, which seems to have been going in the right decision for as long as the company was founded, more than 10 years ago.
Since their debut in 2009, Stripe co-founders and brothers John and Patrick Collison ticked all the important boxes. This allowed their company to get huge funding from the likes of PayPal co-founders Elon Musk and Peter Thiel, and also from many venture capital firms such as Sequoia Capital and Andreessen Horowitz.
Okay but can Stripe process PayPal payments?
Despite getting a large part of their early funding from PayPal founders, Stripe does not currently process any PayPal payments at this time. That being said, you can set up and integrate a separate payment API for PayPal on your store, should you want to have both available at the same time.
Are blank-check SPAC companies the reason why this IPO is skyrocketing?
It is no secrete that IPOs (Initial Public Offering) have gained in popularity lately with social movements on Reddit and other social media platforms. First and foremost, if you are wondering what a SPAC is, basically, it’s an entity solely created for the purpose of bringing a company public on the stock market.
Having this blank-check company open in advance allows a company to take that spot on the stock market very quickly. This process can be done literally overnight instead of taking many days as per the usual process that was used before. The SPAC method, where SPAC stands for Special Purpose Acquisition Company, is now widely used by institutions and companies alike since it’s just a simpler and faster way to go public.
How to get on the IPO Stripe Train?
That’s the thing, in most cases, shares from IPO companies are mainly purchased by institutional investors. Actually, statistics have shown that more than 90% of the shares of a new IPO are usually bought by institutions, leaving a mere 10% to retail investors, if that.
Then, that being said, will Stripe still be a good buy once it is ready to be traded on the stock exchange? Well, nobody can predict the future, and the SPAC opening has been delayed as announced by Stripe’s co-founders back in September 2021. Now, it’s just a waiting game for a new announcement.
How much revenue did Stripe make in total?
Since the company is privately own, we don’t have full-on disclosures of the financial reports. However, recent reports in 2021 have shown that the company’s total revenue could be estimated at around $512.4 billion.
What will be the ticker of Stripe on the stock market?
The ticker should be STRIP by the time the company goes public. As of now, this is a SPAC name, and it’s highly probable that it changes over the course of the process of going public to reflect the change from private to public.
Can Stripe become the biggest IPO in history?
If you wanted to know who is the current record holder in this category, Saudi Aramco would be the one! That’s right, with $29.4 billion raised in its home country, Saudi Aramco’s IPO raised even more money than US very own record holder, Alibaba. The latter had gained around $25 billion, which is not bad at all!
For Stripe, is it possible that its IPO listing will raise even more capital from institutional and retail investors? With its impressive current valuation at $95 billion and a fresh track record of just 10 years or so, everything is pointing out to a home run. Besides, the company will have plenty of time to add more shares to the market if it cannot deliver all of them on the due date, which wouldn’t be surprising considering the staggering valuation. Therefore, you can expect Stripe to be on the lookout for generating follow-on offerings for insiders in the months that will follow Stripe’s IPO launch date.
Is Stripe better than PayPal?
Many people compare the two, as they are both online credit card processors and offer similar features. However, Stripe is more focused to provide simple and effective developer tools for companies of all sizes, while PayPal is widely used for personal and enterprise functionalities with a user-friendly interface.
And that sums up pretty much everything we know about the IPO of the Stripe online payment company. In the end, we can’t predict if this is going to be as interesting for the retail investors as much as it will be for institutions. But, as demonstrated through this text, Stripe is indeed worth keeping an eye on, as we should know its official IPO launch date in the coming months.