Stripe’s 2025 annual letter

**Stripe** (0:00)
We're interrupting your usual Cheeky Pint 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, MatX, 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, floating 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, US 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 US airline profits in 2025
In healthcare, hospital and insurer profit shares have contracted significantly since 2019, but HealthTech 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 US GDP growth in 2025, and will likely soon be a majority of all US growth. And based on what we can already tell from the set of businesses that 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, Base 44, Replet, and Vercell. 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 chart 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. And 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 in 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 was actually a live lobster mail order firm, no joke, in 2002, four years after launching its search product globally.