Stripe’s 2025 annual letter reports a year of accelerating internet economy growth, with businesses on Stripe processing $1.9 trillion in total volume (up 34% year over year, roughly 1.6% of global GDP), powered by over 5 million businesses including nearly all top AI companies, 90% of the Dow Jones Industrial Average, and 80% of the Nasdaq 100.
Stripe remained robustly profitable, shipped over 350 product updates, and completed key acquisitions: Privy (110+ million programmable wallets) and Metronome (usage-based billing for OpenAI, Anthropic, NVIDIA, and others), with the Revenue suite on track for a $1 billion annual run rate.
The letter frames several major themes: winner-take-all dynamics in the economy, the rise of global-by-default businesses, stablecoin payments going mainstream, the capital access gap for small businesses, the untapped revenue in payment optimization, the emerging architecture of agentic commerce, and the cultural-regulatory barriers to innovation.
The sorting machine: markets are concentrating faster than ever
Competitive markets act as a “sorting machine,” directing profits, capital, and talent to the highest-impact companies—but the sorting is happening much faster than in prior decades.
The most profitable third of publicly listed US companies now account for two-thirds of total market cap, the highest share since data began in 1963.
The top 10% of the S&P 500 by market cap accounts for roughly 59% of the index’s total profits.
This is driven by bifurcation within industries: US ecommerce grew 30% over the past three years while brick-and-mortar retail grew only 5% (inflation-adjusted); Delta and United accounted for nearly all US airline profits in 2025; health tech is on track to exceed $110 billion in EBITDA by 2029 even as hospital and insurer profit shares contract.
Software, computers, and data center investment drove nearly half of all US GDP growth in 2025 and may soon be a majority of all US growth.
A new cohort of startups is faster and more global than any before
More companies joined Stripe in 2025 than ever before, with 57% based outside the US; this cohort grows roughly 50% faster on average than the 2024 cohort.
The number of companies reaching $10 million in ARR within three months of launch doubled compared to 2024.
Broader signals confirm acceleration: iOS app releases in December 2025 jumped 60% year over year; GitHub pushes grew 41% between Q3 2024 and Q3 2025 (versus 10–12% in prior years).
Stripe is making integration easier for AI coding tools through claimable sandboxes (used by Manus, Base44, Replit, Vercel), with over 100,000 created; sandboxes convert into live accounts with configuration intact.
Stripe Atlas saw a 41% increase in company formations; 20% of Atlas startups charged their first customer within 30 days in 2025, up from 8% in 2020.
Global by default: the domestic market is now the internet
The old playbook of winning domestically before expanding abroad has dissolved; nearly every major AI product (ChatGPT, Claude, Replit, Lovable, Cursor, Midjourney, and others) launched globally by default.
Among Stripe businesses earning most of their revenue internationally, 30% of that revenue comes from countries that are neither their home market nor one of the top 10 global economies.
Stripe enabled localized checkout in over 100 countries simultaneously, with localized pricing, 120+ payment methods, and built-in tax compliance.
Example: Gamma, a California-based AI presentation platform with 70 million users, saw Indian revenue jump 22% in the month it started accepting UPI payments in India.
Even fintechs have historically been geographically constrained (Chime still US-only after 12 years; Nubank served only Brazil for its first six years), but a new cohort—Sling Money, DolarApp, Félix, KAST—is building global financial apps from day one.
Stripe launched Financial Accounts, its first globally native product, available in over 100 countries on day one, enabling businesses to hold, send, and receive funds.
Stablecoins are decoupling from crypto and going mainstream
After a decade of stablecoin volumes tracking crypto prices, 2025 saw a clear divergence: Bitcoin dropped roughly 50% from its October peak, but stablecoin payments volume doubled to around $400 billion, with an estimated 60% representing B2B payments.
Bridge (Stripe’s acquired stablecoin orchestration platform) saw volume more than quadruple.
New capabilities are catalyzing adoption: a YC founder can receive funding in stablecoins, hold them in a Stripe financial account, and pay engineers anywhere in the world; enterprises can embed digital wallets directly into core products via Privy’s single API (used by Ramp and Deel).
Interoperability with fiat is improving: Bridge partnered with Visa to launch cards that let users spend stablecoins like any other card, with automatic conversion to local currency; Phantom (20 million monthly active users) is rolling out stablecoin-backed cards via Bridge.
Existing blockchains were designed for trading and DeFi, not payments: Bitcoin processes fewer than 10 transactions per second; a memecoin frenzy once delayed Bridge payouts by 12 hours and spiked per-transaction prices 35x.
Stripe unveiled Tempo, a blockchain purpose-built for payments (incubated with Paradigm), offering dedicated payment lanes, sub-second finality, opt-in privacy, and interoperability with compliance and accounting systems.
Visa, Nubank, and Shopify are testing Tempo for global payouts, embedded finance, and remittances.
Klarna launched KlarnaUSD, the first bank-issued stablecoin, on the Tempo testnet via Bridge’s Open Issuance for cross-border settlement.
Tempo’s architecture is designed for agentic payments and microtransactions; mainnet is launching soon.
Stripe Capital: solving the global capital access gap
OECD per capita GDP growth has fallen to 1% since 2008 (from 2.8% annually in the prior 46 years), driven in part by a sharp drop in capital availability for small businesses after the Global Financial Crisis.
Basel III reforms raised bank capital standards; in Ireland, bank lending to small businesses dropped over 66% between 2011 and 2019; in the UK, small business lending contracted in 2012 and stayed weak.
In the US, only 41% of small business loan applications were approved in 2025, down from 50% in 2015.
Stripe Capital uses real-time revenue data from Stripe payments to make lending decisions; businesses repay as a percentage of subsequent sales.
In 2025, Stripe Capital distributed 45% more funds than in 2024 to over 81,000 businesses, many accessed through vertical SaaS platforms (GlossGenius, Tekmetric, Pixieset).
A randomized study found businesses that received and accepted Capital offers grew 27 percentage points faster over the following year than equivalent businesses that didn’t.
The fastest-growing decile grew more than three times faster than comparable peers; the next decile grew nearly 100 points faster.
Example: Xirsys, a California server hosting business, used Stripe Capital financing to set up servers in China, India, and Japan, subsequently doubling revenue.
Even businesses with low credit scores grew 11–18 percentage points faster after receiving financing.
Escaping low revenue mode: the overlooked growth lever in payments
Many mature businesses pursue speculative growth levers (like advertising) that often fail—Gillette’s Cannes award-winning “The Best Men Can Be” campaign coincided with an $8 billion write-down; an Indian Railways Cannes Grand Prix campaign was shut down after eight weeks with no discernible sales increase.
By contrast, optimizing payments infrastructure is a high-ROI, nearly guaranteed source of incremental revenue.
Microsoft evaluates payment providers monthly; Stripe delivered meaningful authorization rate improvements (via Adaptive Acceptance, card account updater, network tokens), leading Microsoft to route more volume through Stripe.
Gatwick Airport’s payment acceptance rate rose 2.5 percentage points after switching to Stripe.
FICO saw a 1 percentage point auth rate increase after an A/B test; Ro (telehealth) saw a 2 percentage point auth rate increase and 3% decrease in disputes, worth tens of millions annually.
“Low revenue mode” means running on old, unoptimized payment infrastructure leaking dollars through suboptimal conversion, authorization, and fraud rates.
“High revenue mode” means localized pricing in local currency, offering relevant local payment methods (BLIK in Poland drives 46% average conversion uplift; Pix in Brazil drives 31%), powered by Stripe’s Payments Foundation Model, Radar, Optimized Checkout Suite, and Authorization Boost.
Stripe is testing tap-to-authenticate via NFC on consumers’ own phones (DoorDash is a partner), which validates card possession and has increased conversion while reducing chargebacks versus previous fraud checks.
New Radar models address fraud vectors emerging from the AI boom, particularly abuse of free trials to steal AI inference.
The five levels of agentic commerce
Agentic commerce—AI buying things on a user’s behalf—has been overhyped, but Stripe frames it as a progression through five levels:
Level 1: Eliminating web forms. The agent fills out payment and shipping details from a URL and returns a confirmation. No decisions are made; it just clicks “buy.”
Level 2: Descriptive search. Users describe a situation (“back-to-school supplies for a third grader in Chicago who likes KPop Demon Hunters and tennis”) and the system reasons across weather, materials, size, price, taste, reviews, and delivery timelines.
Level 3: Persistence. The system remembers preferences, requirements, and purchase history across interactions (“find back-to-school clothes for Bobby”—it already knows Bobby).
Level 4: Delegation. The user sets constraints (“get it done under $400”) and the agent handles search, evaluation, and purchase. This is what most people mean today by agentic commerce.
Level 5: Anticipation. The system knows the school calendar, preferences, and budget; items arrive before the user asks, with only a notification required.
The industry is currently at the edge of levels 1 and 2, in a moment comparable to the mid-1990s when internet protocols (HTTP, HTML, URLs, DNS) were being hashed out—with universal interoperability as the critical enabler.
Stripe’s agentic commerce work in 2025:
Co-developed the Agentic Commerce Protocol (ACP) with OpenAI, an open shared technical language across payment providers and AI platforms.
Introduced Shared Payment Tokens, a payment primitive letting agents initiate payments without exposing credentials; non-Stripe businesses can forward tokens to their own vaults or processors.
Launched Agentic Commerce Suite, enabling businesses to sell across multiple AI interfaces and protocols (ACP and Google’s Universal Commerce Protocol) with a single integration; onboarded brands include Anthropologie, Urban Outfitters, Etsy, Coach, and Kate Spade.
Launched machine payments, letting developers charge agents directly for API calls, MCP usage, and HTTP requests via stablecoin microtransactions—autonomous agents are emerging as a new customer type.
Partnered with OpenAI to power the first shopping experience inside ChatGPT, and is collaborating with Microsoft for Copilot and others.
A Republic of Permissions: culture and regulation as bottlenecks
Nobel laureate Joel Mokyr’s work emphasizes that technological progress depends not just on capital, labor, and technology but on culture—an “improvement mindset” that sees the status quo as correctable—and on the decisions of non-market “aggregators” (regulators, committees, courts).
Today’s economy inhabits a “Republic of Permissions” where well-intentioned regulatory structures can foreclose enormous possibilities:
AI could transform drug discovery, but only if clinical trials become faster and cheaper.
European entrepreneurs have powerful new tools, but the EU AI Act may be counterproductive.
Next-generation nuclear energy could bring abundance, but vetocratic regulatory regimes need overhauling.
Autonomous transport and logistics could dramatically reduce goods costs, but local ordinances and rent-seeking could harden into blockades.
Stripe highlights customers pushing through these barriers: Mistral AI and Bending Spoons (proving world-class European talent); Zipline and Varda (earning permissions for complex hardware); Spring Health and Maven Clinic (building a new software layer for modern healthcare).
Stripe Press has sold 1 million books; Works in Progress magazine has launched print subscriptions at worksinprogress.co/print.
Closing reflection
The letter closes with a metaphor: falling into a black hole feels locally smooth at the event horizon, even though the space of possible futures changes dramatically—2026 may feel similar to prior years, but the next decade will look very different.
Stripe’s enthusiasm centers on the combination of vibrant entrepreneurship and wise cultures as the path to more successful societies, with Stripe Sessions in April as a gathering point for those building economic growth.
