Stripe, Advent Offer $53 Billion to Buy PayPal Holdings

A joint proposal worth $60.50 a share tests PayPal’s board five months after a leadership shake-up, uniting a fast-growing private processor with a veteran buyout firm in a deal that would reshape the payments landscape.

Key takeaways:

• Stripe and Advent International have offered $60.50 per PayPal share, a roughly 28% premium valuing the company above $53 billion and backed by $50 billion in committed bank financing.
• The proposed 50/50 ownership structure would keep PayPal intact rather than break it up, arriving four months after Enrique Lores replaced Alex Chriss as chief executive.
• PayPal shares jumped as much as 15% on the report, though the board has not responded and no formal agreement has been reached.

The Offer on the Table

Stripe and Advent International have submitted a joint proposal to acquire PayPal Holdings for $60.50 a share, according to people familiar with the discussions cited by Reuters. The offer, submitted earlier this month, is backed by about $50 billion in committed financing from banks and represents around a 28% premium to PayPal’s closing share price on Tuesday, valuing the company at more than $53 billion. The two buyers would own the company 50-50, ruling out any breakup. The proposal follows an initial approach made in early April, and Bloomberg first reported Stripe’s interest in acquiring PayPal in February, when Stripe was said to be exploring a purchase of parts or the whole of the company.

None of the three parties has confirmed the talks publicly. PayPal, Stripe and Advent declined to comment, and PayPal has not yet responded, with the parties hoping to move discussions forward in the coming weeks. Reuters’ sourcing was careful to note there is no certainty the approach converts into a signed transaction, a caveat that matters given the scale of financing required and the unusual governance structure being proposed.

A Board Rebuilding Under Pressure

The bid lands at a moment of visible institutional strain. On February 3, 2026, PayPal’s board appointed Enrique Lores, then chief executive of HP, as president and CEO effective March 1, succeeding Alex Chriss. The board’s language was unusually blunt for a public company disclosure: “the pace of change and execution was not in line with the Board’s expectations.” The move came after Chriss failed to halt a slide in PayPal’s share price, down around 80% from five years earlier, and as the company predicted lower earnings for 2026.

Operationally, the transition has not resolved the underlying pressure. PayPal’s first-quarter 2026 results, filed with the SEC, showed net revenues increasing 7% to $8.4 billion, with GAAP operating margin contracting 182 basis points to 17.8% and GAAP EPS decreasing 6% to $1.21, while non-GAAP EPS rose 1% to $1.34. Total payment volume grew 11% to roughly $464 billion, with active accounts broadly flat at 439 million, indicating growth is being driven more by higher usage than by new user acquisition. Despite beating consensus on both lines, the stock fell nearly 9% in premarket trading, reflecting investor concern over rising operating expenses and geographic performance challenges, particularly in Europe.

Lores has since attempted to reset the cost base. He told shareholders in May that redesigning processes around artificial intelligence would enable growth, with the removal of duplicate management layers and accelerated AI adoption expected to generate combined savings of at least $1.5 billion over the next two to three years. By June, PayPal had reportedly planned to shut down its venture capital arm. Taken together, the CEO change, the margin compression and the retrenchment of non-core operations describe a board actively signaling that the status quo was not sustainable, arguably creating the conditions for an external approach to be entertained at all.

Two Balance Sheets, One Ambition

The commercial logic of the pairing rests on an asymmetry in scale that has emerged only recently. Stripe, privately held and headquartered across San Francisco and Dublin, was valued at $159 billion in a February 2026 employee and shareholder tender offer, up from $91.5 billion a year earlier, with total payment volume increasing to $1.9 trillion in 2025, up 34% year over year. That figure now places Stripe’s implied private valuation at roughly three times PayPal’s proposed takeout price, a reversal of the two companies’ relative standing for most of the past decade.

Advent brings the balance sheet discipline and deal infrastructure of a top-tier sponsor. Founded in 1984 and headquartered in Boston, Advent had approximately $100 billion in assets under management as of November 2025, having invested more than $56 billion in private equity capital across over 375 transactions in 42 countries. Pairing a strategic operator with deep product overlap alongside a sponsor capable of underwriting a large debt package is a structure more commonly seen in take-private technology deals than in payments, where regulatory and settlement licensing considerations typically favor either a pure strategic buyer or a pure financial one.

Stablecoins and the Strategic Logic

Beyond valuation arbitrage, the proposed combination speaks to where both companies are placing their bets. A completed deal would combine PayPal’s PYUSD ecosystem and Venmo consumer network with Stripe’s merchant infrastructure and stablecoin technology, as blockchain-based settlement becomes a larger part of global payments. Stripe has been expanding stablecoin and cross-border settlement capacity for corporate treasuries and AI-native businesses, a segment PayPal has approached more cautiously despite launching PYUSD. The reported bid also arrives amid wider consolidation across global payments, as companies seek greater scale in cross-border transfers, business payments and blockchain settlement.

PayPal’s own stablecoin build-out has accelerated in parallel with the reported approach, giving the combination more substance than a shared buzzword. In February 2026, PayPal partnered with MoonPay and the infrastructure provider M0 to launch PYUSDx, a framework that lets outside developers issue their own branded, application-specific stablecoins collateralized by PYUSD rather than building reserve and issuance infrastructure from scratch. The following month, PayPal extended PYUSD directly into user accounts across 70 markets, moving the token beyond its original US and UK footprint. By early July 2026, PYUSD’s market capitalization had climbed to roughly $2.84 billion, making it the third-largest dollar-pegged stablecoin behind Tether’s USDT and Circle’s USDC, still a fraction of its larger rivals but growing from a materially smaller base a year earlier. For Stripe, whose settlement rails already move stablecoin volume for enterprise and AI-native clients, absorbing a regulated, OCC-supervised dollar token with built-in distribution through PayPal and Venmo’s user base would be considerably faster than building equivalent consumer reach organically, one plausible reading of why the two sides see more value in combination than in competing head-on.

What Comes Next

Markets treated the report as credible rather than speculative. PayPal shares rose nearly 15% following the news, a reaction against a base that had already priced in considerable pessimism: shares had closed 0.59% lower at $47.37 before the report, having already absorbed a year of leadership turnover and margin pressure. The premium on offer, roughly 28% to an already depressed base, illustrates less a rich valuation and more the scale of the discount markets had applied to PayPal’s execution risk over the preceding eighteen months.

For now, the deal remains a proposal rather than an agreement. PayPal’s board must weigh a certain, immediate premium against Lores’ own restructuring plan, which management has argued will unlock comparable value over the next two to three years without ceding control. PayPal is facing intensifying competition from Apple Pay and Google Pay, along with a slowdown in growth, a competitive backdrop that cuts both ways: it strengthens the case for scale through combination, and it raises the bar for what standalone execution would need to deliver to justify rejecting an offer of this size. Whether PayPal’s board treats the approach as a floor to negotiate above or a signal to accelerate its own turnaround will likely determine how the next several weeks unfold.