Stripe and Advent Make $53 Billion Play for PayPal

PayPal shares jumped about 16% in premarket trading Wednesday after reports that Stripe and Advent International submitted a joint $60.50-a-share offer, valuing the company at more than $53 billion.

The proposal, made earlier this month and supported by roughly $50 billion of committed bank financing, represents a 28% premium to Tuesday’s close. PayPal has not responded, and the bidders would reportedly own equal stakes. The approach would combine a major merchant-payments infrastructure provider with one of the world’s best-known consumer wallets, although it would likely face significant financing and regulatory scrutiny.

Advent is a Boston-founded private equity firm established in 1984, with $94 billion in assets under management and more than 450 investments as of March 2026. Payments is a core specialty: Advent says it has invested or committed more than $7.8 billion across 18 payments and FinTech companies since 2008. Its record includes Worldpay, Vantiv and Nexi, giving it experience financing, separating, consolidating and operationally restructuring large payment processors.

Stripe, founded by Patrick and John Collison, was valued at $159 billion in a February employee tender offer. Businesses using Stripe generated $1.9 trillion of volume in 2025, up 34%. The strategic logic is clear: PayPal would add a global consumer brand, Venmo and more than 400 million users to Stripe’s merchant-facing technology. That could deepen Stripe’s control of checkout, identity, fraud, wallets and merchant conversion, while creating cross-selling opportunities across both companies’ networks.

PayPal, meanwhile, is valuable but vulnerable. Its shares had fallen 19% this year before the report and remain 84% below their 2021 peak. New CEO Enrique Lores, who took over in March, has reorganized the company into three business units and targeted at least $1.5 billion in gross run-rate savings over two to three years. First-quarter branded-checkout volume grew only 2% on a currency-neutral basis, while Venmo and enterprise payment-services volume grew in the mid-teens. That combination of slow growth in the flagship checkout franchise, strong ancillary assets, substantial scale and a depressed valuation makes PayPal a logical takeover target.

The Financial Times said PayPal had been “reluctant to engage with the two suitors” and cautioned that a deal was unlikely at the proposed valuation. Still, it called a transaction “transformative for Stripe” and described Advent as having a “deep record in payments companies.” Those caveats matter: the offer is an approach, not an agreed transaction, and PayPal’s board may demand a materially higher price.

Recent PYMNTS coverage has traced the same strategic tension, examining how a Stripe-PayPal combination could reorder payments, how checkout weakness prompted a CEO reset, how PayPal reorganized around three business units, and how a Venmo overhaul is testing its consumer-growth strategy.