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Stripe and Advent International‘s reported interest in acquiring PayPal has been warmly received by PayPal’s investors. Stock in the New York-listed payments business was up just over 17% at the end of Wednesday’s trading.
But the bid seems more like an opening salvo than an offer that can’t be refused.
Reuters reported that the bid from Stripe, in partnership with the Boston private equity firm, values the payments pioneer at around $53 billion. This is equivalent to $60.50 per share, a 28% premium over Tuesday’s closing share price.
However, this price works out at around 7 times PayPal’s EBITDA, compared with a median multiple of 8x to 12x for payments businesses, according to data from management consultant Alvarez & Marsal. And this for a business that announced year-on-year revenue growth of 7.2% in its Q1 earnings and generated free cash flow of $5.5 billion in the 12 months leading up to it.
PayPal has been affected by a post-pandemic valuation reset across the fintech market. It has also lost ground to rivals such as Stripe and Apple Pay, hindered by a disjointed tech stack stemming from a history of acquisitions. Its share price is down from more than $300 in July 2021 to $55.52 at the end of trading on Wednesday.
However, PayPal is still the most popular online payment processor by active users, with 439 million, and has a roughly 44% share of the global online payment market, according to data from the market research arm of Capital One.
“This is a distressed entry into an asset that still processes payment volume that’s on par with Stripe’s and still has a strong consumer brand,” said Rudy Yang, senior emerging technologies analyst at PitchBook.
Though this could be viewed as a lowball offer, it’s a marked escalation for Stripe, which, despite its $159 billion valuation, has not made any acquisitions approaching the scale of this one.
Stripe’s largest acquisition to date was its purchase of stablecoin infrastructure startup Bridge, valued at just $1.1 billion, announced in October 2024. The fintech’s last acquisition was Metronome, an AI usage-based billing startup, announced in December 2025 for a reported $1 billion.
“[Tech companies] are becoming just a part of the infrastructure and part of the financial industry, part of the underlying industry that they once served,” said Isabelle Freidheim, managing partner and founder of pre-IPO investment firm Athena Capital.
Advent’s largest deal in the payment space was when it teamed up with Bain Capital to buy Fifth Third Bank‘s payment processing division, Worldpay, in August 2010, from the Royal Bank of Scotland for around $2 billion. They took the business public on the London Stock Exchange in 2015, more than doubling their money.
This article originally appeared on PitchBook News
