By Rajwa Quasim
Stripe, a private payments company, has teamed up with private equity firm Advent International to make a joint offer to buy PayPal Holdings. The bid values PayPal at more than $53 billion.
According to Reuters, Stripe and Advent are offering $60.50 for each share of PayPal stock. The price is about 28% higher than what PayPal shares were trading for on the Tuesday, before the news broke out.
To pay for the deal, the buyers have lined up around $50 billion in financing from banks. Stripe, Advent and payments company Block are contributing $17 billion in equity for the offer, according to CNBC. If the deal goes through, Stripe and Advent plan to own PayPal jointly, splitting ownership equally.
Stripe first showed interest in buying PayPal back in February and reached out in April. According to sources cited by Reuters, a formal offer was finally submitted earlier this month. So far, PayPal has not responded publicly and its board of directors are expected to meet as soon as on July 20 to discuss the offer. PayPal, Stripe, and Advent have all declined to comment publicly on the reports.
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PayPal was one of the earliest and biggest names in online payments, after it was founded in the late 1990s. But the company had struggled in recent years, as market share and growth have slowed down due to rivals like Google Pay and Apple Pay.
Back in 2021, PayPal was worth about $360 billion. As of now, its value has fallen sharply, dropping as low as $36 billion this year. Its stock has lost more than 40% of its value over the past year alone.
If the deal is completed, the Stripe-PayPal merger would create the world’s largest merchant acquirer, combining Stripe’s annual payment volume of about $1.9 trillion with PayPal’s nearly $1.8 trillion, bringing the total to around $3.7 trillion which is equivalent to roughly 3% of global GDP.
PayPal has also brought in new CEO Enrique Lores earlier this year by replacing the former CEO Alex Chriss to lead the turnaround. In April, the company split its operations into three units covering checkout, consumer financial services Venmo, and payments and crypto, while making a series of management changes. In May, Lores said that the company would use artificial intelligence to improve efficiency, simplify operations, and eliminate duplication in workforce layers, but did not provide further details.
READ: PayPal shares up by 13% after partnering with OpenAI (October 28, 2025)
News of the offer caused stocks to jump as much as 14-16%.
Andrew Jeffrey, an analyst at William Blair, said, “We do not think PayPal’s new CEO will likely embrace what could be viewed as a low-ball offer. If the current offer is an opening salvo, we could see Stripe and Advent go as high at $70 per share.”
Stripe’s business mainly focuses on merchants, meanwhile PayPal brings over 430 million customer accounts. TD Cowen analyst Bryan Bergin said, the merger “could be attractive to materially accelerate” Stripe’s efforts to build out its digital wallet plans, giving it direct consumer ties and room to expand financial services, an area PayPal has been pushing lately.