Stripe’s John Collison Says FinTech Not Racing to Go Public

Stripe has no immediate plans to go public, co-founder John Collison told Bloomberg News Tuesday (Jan. 20) in an interview at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.

“We’re still not in any rush,” he said, per the report. “It’s very early for us where, genuinely, it’s the fastest-moving time in our industry since we started Stripe.”

Stripe was valued at $106.7 billion in September, up from $91.5 billion months earlier. Stripe has held several tender offers to give employees and investors a chance to capitalize on their shares without an initial public offering (IPO), the report said.

Collison, who founded Stripe with his brother, Patrick Collison, pointed to agentic commerce as a trend he expects to accelerate in the coming years, comparing it to the evolution from brick-and-mortar stores to eCommerce, according to the report.

Cryptocurrency and stablecoins are also starting to see traction after an extended struggle to gain mainstream adoption, John Collison added, per the report.

William Gaybrick, Stripe’s president of product and business, referred to agentic commerce and stablecoins as “twin revolutions in intelligence and money” at a company event in 2025, the report said.

As PYMNTS CEO Karen Webster wrote in a column in December, it was a 2023 partnership between Stripe and OpenAI that led to the Agentic Commerce Protocol, which combines the dominant conversational AI interface and one of the most widely used payments platforms.

“Together they built a protocol that lets agents complete purchases inside the AI experience while keeping the merchant’s current tech and payment stack intact,” Webster wrote.” Stripe brings decades of experience in digital payments, compliance and settlement workflows. OpenAI brings deep understanding of how conversational intent becomes transaction ready.”

Their bet is straightforward, she wrote. The protocol offers agents a standardized way to send product orders into systems that already power human checkout.

“Agents discover products, build carts, authorize payments and trigger fulfillment through flows merchants already trust,” Webster wrote.

In other Stripe news, the company announced last week that it finalized its acquisition of billing company Metronome.

“We believe the shift toward usage-based models will be a defining feature of the next decade for our industry,” Patrick Collison said in announcing the completed purchase. “Metering and billing are in a very direct sense the interface between ‘product’ and ‘business.’”