5 Interesting Learnings from Stripe at $6.8 Billion in Revenue: 33% Growth, 47% Free Cash Flow Margins, and a $53B Bid for PayPal

Per SaaStr, Stripe hit six point eight billion dollars in revenue last year with thirty-three percent growth—its fastest expansion since twenty twenty-one. The margin story is equally impressive: free cash flow reached three point two billion dollars, up fifty-two percent, delivering a forty-seven percent free cash flow margin. That's roughly double the efficiency of comparable public fintech companies at similar or higher growth rates. Much of that growth comes from processing payments for AI companies—OpenAI, Anthropic, Replit, Cursor, and others. Rather than selling to their boom, Stripe is essentially taxing it. But the company recognizes the economics of pure transaction processing compress over time. So Stripe has built a software business alongside payments: billing, invoicing, and tax tools, anchored by the one-billion-dollar acquisition of Metronome. That non-payments revenue suite is on track to hit a billion dollars in annual revenue. This week, the strategy became explicit: Stripe and Advent offered fifty-three billion dollars for PayPal. The prize isn't Braintree, PayPal's direct competitor, but Venmo and PayPal's consumer wallets—accounts already trusted enough to link to checking accounts. For all its infrastructure excellence, Stripe never built the consumer brand that would make a person trust it with their checking account. PayPal and Venmo have exactly that, and apparently, that asset is worth more than fifty billion dollars to acquire.

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