Stripe Reportedly Lowers Internal Valuation

Payments company Stripe slashed its internal valuation of its shares by 28%, The Wall Street Journal reported Thursday.

The San Francisco-based company told employees last week that its internal share price was $29, down from the $40 per share figure the company had at its last internal valuation, WSJ reported.

Stripe was last valued at $95 billion in March 2021, making it the fifth most valuable private company in the world, according to the The Crunchbase Unicorn Board. The company is backed by investors including Andreessen Horowitz and General Catalyst.

Stripe lowering its share price also lowers the implied valuation of the shares to $74 billion, WSJ reported.

Stripe isn’t the first company to lower its own valuation this year. Instacart cut its own valuation from $39 billion to $24 billion in March. The move came as tech stocks were hammered in the public markets. Instacart was considered a prime candidate to go public in 2022, but IPO activity so far this year has pretty much been at a standstill.

There haven’t been reports of widespread “downrounds”—when a company raises money but its valuation decreases from its last round of funding. But it wouldn’t be surprising if it came to that, given how valuations skyrocketed over the past two years and the current macroeconomic conditions.

Stripe, which was founded in 2010, has raised more than $2 billion in funding as a private company, according to Crunchbase data.

The startup world has long been waiting for Stripe to go public, and here at Crunchbase News we also suspected the company could IPO in 2022. But the public market conditions have been rough with inflation increasing and interest rates rising, and not many companies want to go public right now.

Related reading:

• Instacart Lowers Its Own Valuation From $39B To $24B
• 30 Startups We Think Could Go Public In 2022

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