10. Stripe
Stripe has grown from a few lines of code into a financial payments infrastructure giant and the largest privately valued fintech in the world.
Founders: Patrick Collison (CEO), John Collison
Launched: 2011
Headquarters: San Francisco
Funding: $8.7 billion (PitchBook)
Valuation: $91.5 billion
Key Technologies: Artificial intelligence, machine learning
Industry: Fintech
Previous appearances on Disruptor 50 list: 10 (No. 3 in 2024)
Since its founding in 2010, Stripe has grown from a few lines of code into the largest privately valued fintech in the world.
The now ten-time Disruptor 50 company began as a developer-first solution for online credit card payments. The process for online checkout was notoriously inefficient at the time, and brothers Patrick and John Collison set out to simplify it.
Today, Stripe is a global powerhouse serving millions of businesses from startups to Fortune 500 companies, and it offers much more than its original credit card processing tools. It provides backend scaffolding for billing, fraud prevention, business startup help and in-person payment options – all part of a suite of tools meant to grow and increase profitability for businesses from fellow Disruptor OpenAI, to Amazon, Google, Shopify and Marriott, Apple, Walmart and Target.
Part of Stripe's focus this past year has been serving the artificial intelligence boom. At its Stripe Sessions conference in 2024, the company unveiled over 50 new features, including AI-powered checkout and fraud prevention.
"We are ensuring that Stripe is well-positioned to serve the next chapter of the economy," the Collision brothers wrote in their 2024 annual letter, stressing how the rapidly growing tech will change the fundamentals of online commerce. "More than 700 AI agent startups launched on Stripe last year, a figure that we expect will be substantially eclipsed by the total in 2025," they stated.
In February, Stripe took a major step into the world of cryptocurrency, acquiring Bridge Network, a stablecoin platform, for $1.1 billion. The acquisition, its largest to date, is a part of a "big bet on stablecoins" and part of a larger plan to integrate stablecoins into traditional finance.
"If you think about Stripe and what we've focused on for the past seven years — what I personally have focused on — it's been about breaking down the barriers for global commerce," Neetika Bansal, Stripe's head of money movement products, told CNBC in an interview at the time of the deal. "We've done it, to a large part, on traditional financial rails."
Stripe processes millions of cross-border transactions every day, and Bansal told CNBC stablecoins could cut costs and make transactions easier to execute.
Despite years of speculation about an IPO, the Collison brothers, who serve as president and CEO, have emphasized that going public is not a priority. Stripe has taken a hit from its headiest days during the startup boom, but was able to raise funds at a $91.5 billion valuation in early 2025, almost back to its peak valuation of $95 billion in 2021.
Cost management remains a focus. Earlier this year, the fintech company cut 300 jobs in product, engineering and operations, roughly 3.5% of its workforce. But the company said it was still expecting to increase headcount to 10,000 by the end of the year and was "not slowing down hiring."
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This story originally appeared on: CNBC - Author:Sara Lindsay
