Stripe and Advent Make a $53 Billion Play for PayPal

What was once worth $360 billion is now a takeover target.

Stripe, the payments infrastructure company, has teamed up with private equity firm Advent International to offer $60.50 per share for PayPal — a deal valued at more than $53 billion. Reuters broke the news Tuesday, citing sources familiar with the matter.

The consortium has secured roughly $50 billion in bank financing commitments to back the offer, according to people close to the talks. PayPal has not yet responded, but Stripe and Advent hope to advance discussions in the coming weeks.

PayPal was the pioneer of online payments, but its lead has eroded. Apple Pay and a wave of fintech startups have chipped away at its dominance. The company’s market cap peaked at around $360 billion during the pandemic-era tech boom of 2021. This year, it touched a low of roughly $36 billion.

The offer price of $60.50 per share represents a significant premium over where PayPal has been trading. In pre-market trading Tuesday, PayPal shares jumped 16.11% to $55.00.

All three parties — PayPal, Stripe, and Advent — declined to comment on the Reuters report.

This isn’t the first sign of Stripe’s interest. Bloomberg reported in February that Stripe was exploring an acquisition of all or part of PayPal. At the time, PayPal pushed back publicly, saying it wasn’t in sale talks with Stripe or anyone else, and was preparing for possible activist investor campaigns or hostile bids.

Advent International, one of the world’s largest private equity firms, manages over $100 billion in assets and has a track record in fintech. Stripe itself was valued at $95 billion in early 2021, before a market correction brought its internal valuation down to $74 billion in 2022. By 2023, reports pegged its worth at roughly $50 billion.

The $60.50-per-share offer would value PayPal well above its February market cap of $43.3 billion. It’s a turnaround bet on a fading payments giant, and a bet that Stripe and Advent can extract more value from PayPal’s assets than the market currently believes is there.