Stripe looking for exchange listing, as per reports
Stripe, one of the largest payment service providers in the world, is looking to list the company on the stock exchange, as per reports on Reuters and other media.
The company was started in 2011 by the Irish brothers Patrick and John Collison and since then it has slowly and steadily grown and it now processes hundreds of billions of dollars in transactions across millions of merchants around the world. So far, it has resisted the temptation to go public and has preferred to keep the company private by going for private fundraising and as per the latest round of investments, the company is valued at $95 billion which makes it one of the largest private companies.
But now there are reports which say that they have hired the law firm, Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton to prepare the decks for a listing. It is understood that they may not go for an IPO and would rather go for a public listing similar to what Wise had done recently. By going public, it would be easier for Stripe to finance acquisitions by getting access to extra funds. But the process of listing is likely to take time and it is expected that it would complete only sometime next year.
Some of the early investors into the company include Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, and the venture arm of Google which shows the kind of backers that the company has and how they believed that its business model would be a success in the future and their trust has been well and truly repaid over the years.
If and when the listing happens, the company is likely to get a lot of attention in the stock markets as it is one of the last remaining tech giants that are yet to be listed, and the investors, both retail and institutional, are likely to view it as the last chance for them to own shares of a tech and payment giant and one of the highly valued startups. So far, the owners have been tight-lipped about their exact plans to go public though they have hinted off and on in few interviews to Bloomberg and other media about their idea to go public sometime down the line. The timing of the listing is not yet very clear as the process is long and in the next step, the investment banks would come in and things could always change in the future as well, depending on what deliberations go on between the owners, the investors, and the banks.
