We're interrupting your usual cheeky pine programming today to bring you Stripe's 2025 annual letter, read in full, by me. Not AI me. Full, proper me. Normal service will come back on Thursday when I'll be welcoming Rainer Pope, founder of AI chip company Matex, to the booth. But on to the letter. Last year, businesses running on Stripe generated $1.9 trillion in total volume, up 34% from 2024, an equivalent to roughly 1.6% of global GDP. Our programmable financial services now power more than 5 million businesses directly or via platforms, including all the top AI companies, many of the largest blue-chip companies, 90% of the Dow Jones Industrial Average, most of the biggest tech companies, 80% of the NASDAQ 100, and a significant fraction of freshly minted startups. 25% of all Delaware corporations are now created with Stripe Atlas. Beyond payments, these businesses are using Stripe to accelerate their growth with billing and subscription management, tax compliance, fraud prevention, embedded finance, global treasury management, and much besides. Link, the easiest way to pay online, is now used by more than 200 million people. Stripe remained robustly profitable in 2025, allowing us to continue investing heavily in product development with over 350 product updates over the last year, as well as acquisitions. Since our last update, we acquired Privy, which powers more than 110 million programmable wallets, and Metronome, which powers the complex usage-based billing models used by companies like OpenAI, Anthropic, Confluent, and NVIDIA. Metronome joins our revenue suite, comprising Stripe Billing, invoicing, tax, and more, which is on track to hit an annual run rate of a billion dollars this year. All in all, 2025 was a strong year for the internet economy, and we're delighted to see so many of Stripe's customers doing well. Let's talk about what we've been dubbing the sorting machine. So, at their heart, competitive markets are a sorting machine. They direct profits, capital, and talent to the places of greatest impact as discerned by customers voting with their wallets. Historically, this sorting happened methodically. It typically took decades for a household name to be unseated or for a new entrant to reach meaningful scale. But the sorting machine is now whirring faster. winners and losers are being anointed more quickly and more intensely. Today, the most profitable third of publicly listed companies in the United States accounts for two-thirds of the total market capitalization, the highest share since data began in 1963. And much of this is a story of profit concentration, not just valuations. The top 10% of the S&P 500 by market cap now accounts for roughly 59% of the index's total profits, which is elevated relative to recent history. Much of this is driven by bifurcation within industries. In retail, for example, U.S. brick-and-mortar sales grew just 5% over the past three years, whereas e-commerce sales grew 30% over the same period. Both of those in inflation-adjusted terms. In air travel, the big three of American, Delta, and United all increased their share of industry revenues and profits over the past decade. They were big to start with. And now, Delta and United accounted for nearly all U.S. airline profits in 2025. In healthcare, hospital and insurer profit shares have contracted significantly since 2019, but health tech is on track to exceed $110 billion in EBITDA by 2029. Each sector has its own particular dynamics, but the pattern is clear. A cohort of companies is pulling away. Economy-wide, demand for software, computers, and data center investment drove nearly half of all U.S. GDP growth in 2025, and will likely soon be a majority of all U.S. growth. And based on what we can already tell from the set of businesses started on Stripe in 2025, a remarkable cohort, there are no signs of the sorting machine slowing down anytime soon. In 2025, many more new companies joined Stripe than ever before, with more than half of them, 57%, based outside the US. This new cohort is by far the highest performing and fastest moving we've ever seen, growing around 50% faster than the 2024 cohort on average. The number of companies reaching 10 million in ARR within three months of launch was double that of the 2024 cohort. This seems to be part of a larger expansion and acceleration in our industry. After years of relative calm, the number of iOS apps released in December 2025 jumped by 60% year-over-year. Someone should check on the App Store review team's sleep scores. Even code production is accelerating. Pushes to GitHub, which grew roughly 10% to 12% in prior years, jumped 41% between Q324 and Q325. As building gets easier, we're working on making Stripe even simpler to integrate, including for the agents. We recently introduced claimable Stripe sandboxes, which let you start using Stripe directly from your AI coding tools like Manus, Base44, Replit, and Vercel. And when you're done with v1 and your product is ready to launch, that sandbox converts into a live Stripe account with its configuration intact. More than 100,000 sandboxes have already been created this way. We're also improving Stripe Atlas, the world's easiest way to incorporate a business, which saw a 41% increase in company formations last year. Atlas companies are monetizing sooner. In 2025, 20% of Atlas startups charted their first customer within 30 days, up from 8% for that same number in 2020. As we look at these figures, there's an obvious question, is 2025 an anomaly or the beginning of a new regime? And time will tell, But our best guess is that the 2025 acceleration is the start of a larger inflection in entrepreneurship and creativity facilitated by advances in large language models. We have an ambitious roadmap of improvements planned. Stripe will be the best way to build a business in the era of AI. Now let's talk about how businesses are increasingly global by default. For those with aspirations to go global, the conventional playbook used to be a steady, sequential progression. You win at home, and then you push abroad. It took Coca-Cola 20 years to bottle its first soda Cuba, while McDonald's and Starbucks waited 27 and 16 years, respectively, to serve their first customers in Canada. After the arrival of the World Wide Web, free services tended to launch globally, but then their monetization machinery still operated on a time delay to catch up. So when Facebook changed from a college-only network to a public platform in 2006, anyone with a browser could create an account, but anyone with money couldn't necessarily advertise. Support for international currencies didn't arrive until 2009, five years after the company was founded. For its part, Google only accepted its first payment in British pounds from an advertiser in the UK, which is actually a live lobster mail-order firm, no joke, in 2002, four years after launching its search product globally. Over the last few years, the country-by-country expansion model has just melted away. The domestic market for a new generation of internet businesses is the internet itself. Nearly every AI product you've heard of is all the rage in every country you've heard of. Cloud Repl Base44 Vercel Cursor Midjourney and many more launched globally by default And this isn merely about incremental revenue from a long tail of international users In many cases, the long tail is much of the dog. Of businesses on stride that earn most of their revenue internationally, 30% of that revenue comes from countries that are neither their home market nor one of the top 10 global economies. And this is possible largely due to infrastructure that no longer makes foreign demand feel foreign. Last year, we enabled businesses to launch a localized checkout in more than 100 countries simultaneously complete with localized pricing to maximize conversion, more than 120 payment methods, and local tax compliance supported out of the box. Sometimes, improved infrastructure is only felt after decades, but other times pent-up demand reveals itself overnight. Gamma is a California-based AI platform used by 70 million people to create presentations. When they joined the first cohort of Stripe users to accept UPI payments in India, their Indian revenue jumped 22% in that very same month. Ironically, the tech companies most constrained by barriers of financial geography have tended to be fintechs themselves. 12 years after launching Chime, you can only open a new Chime account from inside the United States. NewBank, founded in 2013, served only Brazil for its first six years and added only two other countries in the last six. And these are some of the most successful fintechs out there. Even at Stripe, our issuing product is available in only 22 countries some seven years after launch. That's faster than most, but not as fast as we would like. This is also changing. The latest cohort of fintech companies, Sling Money, Dolarapp, Felix, and Cast, to name just a few, are building global financial apps right out of the gate. Similarly, last year, we launched our first globally native product, Financial Accounts, which businesses can use to hold, send, and receive funds. And we made it available to businesses in more than 100 countries on day one. And this progress is in large part due to stablecoins, where borderlessness allows fintechs to set up infrastructure that works everywhere. Global-by-default financial services are, for the first time, a real possibility. Now, let's talk about stablecoins. It may be a crypto winter, but it's a stablecoin summer. After a decade of stablecoin volumes tracking the undulations of the crypto asset prices, last year saw a clear divergence. In 2025, the price of Bitcoin dropped precipitously and is now 50% down from October, but stablecoin payments volume doubled to around $400 billion, 60% of which is estimated to represent B2B payments. Bridge, the stablecoin orchestration platform we acquired, saw volume more than quadruple. Stablecoin payments are marching quietly and inexorably forward as real-world uptake continues apace. This growth has been catalyzed by a raft of new capabilities. A Y Combinator founder can now receive funding in stablecoins, hold them in a Stripe financial account, and use them to pay their first engineers who could be anywhere in the world. Enterprises are leaning on stablecoins to expand internationally, now with better tools to embed digital wallets directly into their core products. With Privy, companies like Ramp and Deep have a single API to provision easy-to-use wallets in both custodial and non-custodial models, which allows fully global products to be built from day one. The interoperability between crypto and fiat is also rapidly improving. In April, Bridge partnered with Visa to introduce cards that allow businesses and consumers to spend their stablecoins just like any other card. The payments deducted from a stablecoin balance, and automatically converted into the local currency. The business receives funds just like any other payment, blissfully unaware of the stablecoin origins. Fantom, one of the most popular crypto wallets with 20 million monthly active users, is using Bridge to roll out stablecoin backcards to their customers. As we prepare for a world of massive stablecoin adoption, we spend time thinking about blockchains. Today's blockchains have been designed for trading and DeFi, and the attributes that matter for payments, including throughput, reliability, cost, predictability, and privacy, have not been a significant focus. Bitcoin processes fewer than 10 transactions a second. Last year, a meme coin trading frenzy on one of the major blockchains delayed payouts for one bridge user by 12 hours and spiked per transaction prices 35 times. While such operational issues are already significant, they'll only intensify, for we expect the appetite for transactions to grow a great deal. In our view, agents will most likely soon be responsible for most internet transactions and will likely need blockchains that support more than a million or maybe even more than a billion transactions a second. So in September, we unveiled Tempo, a blockchain purpose-built for payments, incubated together with Paradigm. With Tempo, businesses get dedicated payment lanes, sub-second finality, opt-in privacy, and interoperability with compliance and accounting systems. These features might sound prosaic, but they matter a great deal for infrastructure that supports real-world economic activity. Companies like Visa, NewBank, and Shopify are already testing Tempo for a number use cases, including global payouts, embedded finance, and remittances. Klarna, whose CEO was once a self-proclaimed crypto skeptic, became the first bank to launch a stablecoin, Klarna USD, on the Tempo testnet, using Bridges' open issuance to facilitate faster and cheaper cross-border settlement. Tempo's architecture is also particularly well-suited to agentic payments and microtransactions. Tempo's mainnet will be launching soon, and we look forward to seeing what ambitious businesses decide to build with it. Now let's talk about the availability of capital. Since 2008, GDP per capita growth has been a sluggish 1% in OECD countries, down from 2.8% a year on average for the 46 prior years when data begins. And it's always tempting to reach for local explanations, you know, Japan's aging workforce, or Brexit, or Europe's energy mix, or all these kind of things. But there's good evidence that a significant culprit is the sharp global drop in the availability of capital. Indeed, in most OECD countries, capital requirements for banks went up and capital access for small businesses went down, following the global financial crisis. Basel III reforms raised capital standards for large banks around the world. In Ireland, bank lending to small businesses dropped by more than 66% between 2011 and 2019. In the UK, small business lending contracted in 2012 and remained weak thereafter. The US fared slightly better with easier access to capital from non-bank lenders and 1.7% per capita GDP growth over the last 15 years. But the broad trends, post-Dodd-Frank, are the same, tightening of bank rules, and reduced access to capital for small businesses. Only 41% of small business loan applications were approved in the U.S. last year, down from 50% in 2015. We created Stripe Capital to help solve the global paucity of access to capital, especially for small businesses. For businesses that use Stripe to accept payments, their real-time revenue data makes for a simple input to a lending decision. Businesses pay back loans as a small percentage of their subsequent sales, effectively drawing working capital forward from their own growth. Last year, Stripe Capital distributed 45% more funds compared to 2024 to more than 81,000 businesses. Many of these businesses had access to Stripe Capital funds directly through the vertical SaaS platforms on which they run Gloss Genius for beauty salons TechMetric for auto shops Pixie Set for photographers and so on Over the last two years we ran a randomized study to understand the causal impact of capital. When we help businesses grease their wheels, how fast can they grow? Turns out a lot faster. Businesses that received and accepted capital offers grew, on average, 27 percentage points faster over the following year than the otherwise equivalent businesses who didn't. And the averages conceal a widespread. The fastest growing decile of finance businesses grew more than three times faster than comparable peers. The next decile grew nearly 100 points faster. A representative example, Xersus, a server hosting business based in California, used financing from Stripe Capital to set up additional servers in China, India, and Japan, subsequently doubling its revenue. Notably, even businesses with low credit scores grew 11 to 18 percentage points faster after receiving financing. It's speculative, but we wonder whether access to capital will become a more important factor in economic outcomes over the coming years, as advanced in artificial intelligence increase the returns on investment. Now, let's talk about what we've taken to calling low revenue mode. For mature businesses, there's notably few guaranteed growth levers hiding in plain sight, and the most enticing ones don't always work out. Take advertising. In In 2019, Gillette won a silver lion at Cannes for their ad The Best Men Can Be. Later that year, P&G took an $8 billion write-down on the business as the award-winning campaign failed to ignite growth. More recently, a campaign for Indian Railways won a Grand Prix and six gold lions at Cannes in 2025 for its golden ticket-style daily lottery where each day they'd have a train ticket number that was eligible to win 10,000 rupees. But the campaign was shut down after eight weeks with no discernible increase in ticket sales. This is why, 15 years in, we are evangelically animated about payments. Unlike more speculative paths to growth, optimizing your payment setup is almost guaranteed to yield extra revenue and to be among the highest ROI growth activities that you could undertake. Microsoft, for example, evaluates the precise performance of each of their payment service providers on a monthly basis. Between June and October, Stripe delivered a meaningful increase in authorization rates for Microsoft using a combination of adaptive acceptance, card account updater, network tokens, and more. As a result, Microsoft is now routing a larger share of its payment volume through Stripe. Gatwick Airport had been dealing with a string of failed payments, disputes, and customer complaints under its previous payment provider. After switching to Stripe, payment acceptance rate rose by 2.5 percentage points. Following an A-B test against a former payment provider, FICO implemented Stripe and saw a 1 percentage point increase in auth rates. Telehealth company Rowe saw a 2 percentage point increase in auth rates and a 3% decrease in dispute activity over the last 12 months with Stripe, resulting in tens of millions of dollars annually. Most businesses are today operating in what we call low revenue mode, running on old, unoptimized payments infrastructure that's leaking dollars left, right, and center through conversion, auth, and fraud prevention rates that should be so much better. High revenue mode looks like a checkout that adapts differently to each customer. You should be pricing your products in local currency and offering the right set of the hundreds of local payment methods that are most relevant. Presenting Blick to your customers in Poland drives an average 46% increase in checkout conversion. Offering Pix does the same in Brazil with a 31% average conversion uplift. This is all powered by a decades-long investment in AI, including our payments foundation model and AI-powered services like Stripe Radar, optimized checkout suite, and authorization boosts that quietly optimize billions of dollars of transaction volume every day. And yet, there's still so much more room for improvement. Last year, we started testing the ability for consumers to tap their card on their own phone for authentication, which validates the card through the NFC chip and all but guarantees the cardholder actually has possession of the physical card. DoorDash, a partner in this trial, has seen a meaningful increase in conversion versus their previous fraud checks while reducing chargeback rates. We also built new models for radar to handle a wider range of broad vectors emerging in response to the AI boom, in particular, the very common attempts to steal AI inference through abusing free trials or similar mechanism. So, CEOs, splashy ad campaigns. They're good fun, but don't overlook the revenue growth right under your nose. Your heads of payments almost definitely deserve more recognition. So let's maybe throw them an awards ceremony in the South of France for payments optimizations, or if you want a foggier version of that, we'd love to see them in San Francisco this April for Stripe Sessions. Now let's talk about agentic commerce. and the different levels of agented commerce. So most of the recent excitement AI has been around some form of tool use models, able not only to cogitate on data within the pre-training corpus, but to go out and search the web, or use a browser, deploy code, or similarly take some action on the wider internet. The form of tool use most relevant to our world is agented commerce, the idea that your AIs will soon be buying stuff on your behalf. Now, like most in AI, agented commerce suffers from having been a bit overhyped too early. People paint this utopian picture of autonomous agents running around, planning your whole life, executing commerce without, you know, even talking to you. We find it helpful to build up a broader vision of agentic commerce in small chunks. So level one is just eliminating web forms. You research what you want to buy, but filling out web forms is no one's idea of fun. It would be really handy if you could just send the URL to your agent and have it fill out the form, the payment and shipping details, and come back to you with the confirmation. So the system isn't making any decisions for you, it's just typing and clicking buy on your behalf. Then level two is descriptive search. So you stop searching for products or specific attributes or keywords and start describing the situation. So you might say, I need back to school supplies for a third grader in Chicago, including clothes, nothing too itchy or tight, pencils, notebooks, a lunchbox, my son likes kpop demon hunters and tennis, and school starts in late August. And the system can reason across weather and materials and size and durability and price and taste and reviews and delivery timelines and everything. And specialized and long-tailed products, they become easier to find. Annoyingly blunt keyword searches become a thing of the past. Then level three is about layering in persistence. So you can stop reintroducing yourself every single time. Each search is not a brand new scenario. You can say instead, find me options for my back-to-school clothes for Bobby. And the system already knows your preferences and remembers any requirements and, you know, infers from your previous conversations and purchases, you're still deciding what to buy. You're clicking confirm on every purchase, but you're choosing from a set of options that reflect you and your taste and budget and history. Then level four is where you get into delegation. And so you stop having to make all the choices. You could say, get the back-to-school shopping done and keep it under $400. And the system handles the search and the evaluation process and the purchases on your behalf. and you trust it like you might your partner that it weigh the trade and it choose things that your son would like All you do is determine the budget And this is what most people mean today when they talk about agent of commerce is this level four level of delegation. And then level five is anticipation. Maybe you don't do any prompting. The system already knows the school calendar, your son's preferences, your typical budget. All you do is receive a notification. Here's the back to school list of everything that we've already bought. And this is the most futuristic vision where things are showing up right before you need them without you having to ask. But today, the industry is hovering right on the edge of levels maybe one and two. With agentic commerce, we're reminded of those few years in the mid-1990s when the structure of the internet we use today was hashed out. Netscape developed graphical web browsers, HTTP, HTML, URLs, DNS all gained prominence. At the time, no one knew exactly which protocols or players would have been out. There was an Alta Vista for every Google. And we're in a similarly rare moment now with agentic commerce, which has the potential to be generationally impactful. But as with the early internet, the future success of agentic commerce is contingent on universal interoperability. Our ascent through those five levels we discussed depends on our ability to all work together. And to that end, we've been busy. A few highlights from our last year include, with OpenAI, we developed the agentic commerce protocol to establish a shared technical language between AI platforms and businesses. It's open by design, working across payment providers and across AI platforms. We introduced shared payment tokens, a new payment primitive that lets agents initiate payments without exposing credentials. You don't want to be flinging your credit cards all around the web. Even businesses that don't process payments with Stripe can forward these tokens to their own vaults or other processors as secure credentials. We launched Agenta Commerce Suite, which provides tooling for businesses to sell across multiple AI interfaces and protocols, including our own ACP and the Universal Commerce Protocol that Google unveiled last month, with a single integration. Checkout, Payments, and Fraud Protection continue to work predictably underneath the hood. Brands already onboarding to ACS include Anthropologie, Urban Outfitters, Etsy, Coach, Kate Spade, and a bunch more. We launched Machine Payments, a way for developers to charge agents directly for API calls, MCP usage, and HTTP requests using stablecoin microtransactions. Autonomous agents themselves are emerging as a new customer type for internet businesses to sell to. And we partnered with OpenAI to power the first shopping experience inside ChatGPT. This is huge. We're also collaborating with Microsoft to bring similar capabilities to Copilot and with others. There's no forecasting exactly where agentic commerce will be by the end of 2026. But it's clear we've already moved well beyond pure hype into a phase of building and real-world experimentation. And the pace of change will likely only accelerate from here. If all goes well, the little critters are not going to be cooped up in walled gardens, but they'll be zooming down the wide open protocol highways. Lastly, let's talk about entrepreneurship more generally. Today's entrepreneurs and innovators have tools and reach that prior generations of industrialists could not have fathomed. We'll hopefully soon witness the combinatorial effect of human ingenuity playing out in the form of productivity gains and improved living standards everywhere. Last year, Joel Mokir was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences. Mokir is widely known for emphasizing the importance of culture relative to the traditional economic inputs of capital, labor, and technology. 18th century industrialists, they didn't just have coal or geography on their side, they had a new culture, an improvement mindset that saw the status quo as imperfect and correctable. In the political economy of technological change, Mocher also observed that new technologies have in the past often failed, despite their economic superiority, because technological decision-making implicates not only suppliers and customers, but also a broad variety of non-market aggregators, regulators, committees, courts, that influence what is adopted. As AI and the internet expand the scope of what's possible, synthetic impediments to adoption and adaptation will become increasingly costly. Our bifurcating economy shows that growth is contingent on the application of useful knowledge, and not some preordained result as a result of its abstract availability. AI harbors the promise of enormously improving drug discovery, but the potential will only be realized if we make the regulatory processes, including clinical trials, faster and cheaper. in Europe can boost tepid economies with new tools, but only if well-intentioned yet counterproductive burdens such as the EU AI Act are curtailed. Next-generation approaches to nuclear energy could usher in energy abundance, but only if we overhaul veto-cratic regulatory regimes. Autonomous transport and logistics from long-haul trucking to drones could dramatically reduce the cost of physical goods, provided we don't let a slurry of local ordinances and rent-seeking hardened into a blockade. Mocher wrote about the importance of the Republic of Letters in catalyzing the Industrial Revolution. But today we inhabit a Republic of Permissions, a filtering sieve of non-market aggregators. While many of our strictures are sensibly motivated, it's more important than ever to ensure that they carefully balance the benefits achieved with the possibilities foreclosed. We're privileged to support many businesses with the tenacity to show what's possible. Mistral AI and Bending Spoons are proving that world-class European talent can puncture the regulatory permafrost. Zipline and Varda are earning permissions for complex new hardware inch by inch, while Spring Health and Maven Clinic are stitching together a new software layer for modern healthcare. We continue to believe in the importance of ideas fueling economic progress and believe that many of the best are undervalued. The Stripe Press catalog is home to many of the people, stories, and models we think can contribute to the next set of improvements. The team recently celebrated one million books sold. Works in Progress, our magazine of underrated ideas to improve the world, has also recently branched out into print subscriptions. And you can get yours over at worksinprogress.co.com. We highly recommend it. So, to wrap up. Much of this letter has been dedicated to advances in AI, which can seem hard to keep up with at times. You know, the qualitative difference between the just-release products and last year's state-of-the-art is huge. We're reminded of the phenomenon of falling into a large black hole. Now, I hope this never happens to you, but if you do ever experience that particular misfortune, you don't actually feel anything at the special moment when you cross the event horizon. The path is locally smooth, even though the space of possible futures changes dramatically upon the point of crossing the threshold. And we're sharing this letter at what might well turn out to be the advent of a different and hopefully much more beneficent singularity. While much around us in 2026 feels similar to prior years, it's locally smooth, it's also clear that the next decade will look very different to those just gone by. We're as enthusiastic as ever about how vibrant entrepreneurship and wise cultures can contribute to more successful future societies, and we hope that Stripe can play a small role in that. And if you're propelling economic growth yourself, whether as an entrepreneur, a business leader, or financial infrastructure builder, we hope to welcome you at Stripe Sessions in April. As always, there is so much to discuss.
