Stripe and Advent in Renewed Talks to Acquire PayPal After $53 Billion Bid Rejected

Stripe and private equity firm Advent International are in active talks to acquire PayPal at a price above the $60.50 per share offer PayPal rejected in July, according to the Wall Street Journal (Engadget). A deal could be announced in the coming weeks if the parties agree on price.

The initial offer, made in July and independently confirmed by CNBC (CNBC), valued PayPal at approximately $53 billion and represented a 28% premium to PayPal's closing price the Tuesday before the proposal. PayPal's board deemed the bid inadequate, with sources telling Reuters that directors saw the $53 billion figure as undervaluing the company (Reuters).

The gap between offer and asking price is set against a stark valuation decline. PayPal was trading at historic lows before the proposal, with a market value of roughly $40 billion at the time, down approximately $320 billion from its pandemic-era peak (Engadget). Wall Street analysts have indicated that Stripe and Advent can afford to pay more and expect them to raise the offer (Reuters). The acquirers have assembled $17 billion in equity for the transaction (Reuters).

Per Reuters, Stripe and Advent would each hold an equal stake and become joint owners of PayPal if the deal closes. They have no plans to break up the company, a decision that would make Stripe one of the largest online payment processors globally (Engadget). A combined entity would process approximately $3.7 trillion in payments annually. Beyond raw scale, a merger could reduce Stripe's dependence on Visa and Mastercard rails and give it direct ownership of Venmo, PayPal's checkout system, and PayPal's crypto features (Engadget).

The strategic logic of bringing Venmo and PayPal's checkout flow in-house is straightforward. Stripe's developer-first API layer and merchant acquisition engine have always sat one hop away from the consumer wallet. Owning both ends of a transaction, from checkout button to settlement, is the kind of vertical integration that the card networks have defended for decades through network rules and interchange structures. A combined Stripe-PayPal would not eliminate that structure, but it would give merchants a meaningfully larger surface area for routing transactions outside the traditional card rails, particularly for account-to-account transfers and crypto-denominated settlement. The $3.7 trillion figure, if accurate, places the combined entity in a processing-volume tier that few competitors could match.

The Advent partnership is worth noting on its own. Stripe has historically operated as a privately held company with a famously deliberate approach to capital structure. Bringing in a private equity partner with equal ownership stake suggests the financing requirements of a $53 billion-plus acquisition exceed what Stripe's existing balance sheet and equity base can absorb alone. The $17 billion equity commitment assembled so far is substantial, but the total consideration would also require significant debt financing, and the cost of that debt in the current rate environment is a variable PayPal's board can reasonably point to when arguing the bid is too low.

Separately, Stripe is also in talks to acquire OpenRouter, an AI-model marketplace, according to the Wall Street Journal (WSJ). That discussion predates the most recent PayPal developments, having been reported in late July, but it signals that Stripe is pursuing acquisition activity across two fronts simultaneously: a transformative payments consolidation and a smaller, targeted move into AI infrastructure monetization.

For technology professionals watching the payments landscape, the PayPal negotiations matter because the outcome will reshape merchant acquiring, consumer wallet competition, and the economics of alternative payment rails. If Stripe and Advent close at a higher price, the combined entity's pricing power and ability to offer end-to-end payment processing, from consumer wallet to merchant settlement, will compress the competitive space for standalone payment processors and checkout providers. The coming weeks will determine whether the parties bridge the valuation gap that has so far kept a deal at arm's length.