It’s January, so it’s time again to speculate about whether payments group Stripe – founded by the Irish brothers John and Patrick Collison – will go public this year.
There’s been a number of articles on financial websites already this month betting that 2024 will be the year Stripe floats. Both Crunchbase and Morningstar, two financial data and news websites, have confidently predicted it would happen, based it seems on a single fact: that the company had hired a new chief financial officer, Steffan Tomlinson, in September.
A more compelling reason was published by Tech Crunch (another financial data and news website), which first surveyed a clutch of venture capitalists about which company would float in 2024 – the top pick was Stripe.
Tech Crunch also noted figures compiled by Caplight (yet another financial data website), which revealed that “there has been an absolute flurry of buyers looking to get shares in the company in recent months”.
[ Stripe’s Irish users hit €20bn as internet economy thrivesOpens in new window ]
[ Losses at European arm of Stripe grow as cost of sales increaseOpens in new window ]
That was reflected by a noticeable rise in the value of the shares. At the end of 2023, for example, Stripe’s shares had been going for a little bit more than $20, but by the start of the new year that price was up to $21.06 apiece, Tech Crunch reported. And since then it has risen again, to about $22.50.
That figure, of course, is substantially down from the more than $80 a share it was trading at in 2021, or the $50 it was fetching in 2022.
The dramatic watering-down in value, partly driven by Stripe’s own fundraising, would help to engineer some upside for investors in the event of a possible float, it argued, while other companies remain hopelessly overvalued.
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