Stripe

Founded in 2010 by brothers Patrick and John Collison, Stripe started with a simple idea: let developers accept online payments with a few lines of code. Today it’s grown into one of the world’s most valuable private companies, dual-headquartered in San Francisco and Dublin, with roughly 15,464 employees as of May 2026. Tracxn

The scale is hard to overstate. Businesses on Stripe generated $1.9 trillion in total payment volume in 2025, up 34% from 2024 — equivalent to roughly 1.6% of global GDP. Stripe now powers more than 5 million businesses, including 90% of the Dow Jones Industrial Average and 80% of the Nasdaq 100. Merchants in 50+ countries use Stripe to accept and process payments. A February 2026 tender offer valued the company at $159 billion, backed by investors like Thrive Capital, Coatue, and Andreessen Horowitz. CoinLaw + 4

Where the product has expanded:
What began as a payments API has turned into full financial infrastructure. In February 2026, Stripe acquired Metronome, a usage-based billing platform, to close a gap where AI companies like OpenAI and Anthropic had been running on Metronome instead of Stripe Billing. Stripe also shipped native metering for LLM tokens and an Agentic Commerce Suite built for AI agents. On the crypto side, Stripe bought Bridge for $1.1 billion, and its own stablecoin chain, Tempo, went live in 2025, bringing USDC settlement and cross-border payouts on-chain in 2026.

Why this matters for tech roles:

• API-first engineering culture — Stripe is famous among developers for treating its API and documentation as a core product, not an afterthought.
• AI infrastructure push — Recent hiring demand centers on agentic commerce, token-based billing, and fraud ML, since Stripe partnered with Meta and Google to expand its Agentic Commerce Suite and let AI agents transact via a new Machine Payments Protocol co-authored with Tempo.
• Fraud & risk ML — Stripe Radar is used by AI companies like OpenAI, Anthropic, ElevenLabs, and Cursor, as well as enterprises like PepsiCo and Hertz, to fight fraud, making risk modeling a growing engineering focus.
• Global, distributed infra — Supporting 135+ currencies and dozens of payment methods across regions means heavy investment in reliability, compliance, and localization engineering.