Stripe and Advent Push to Buy PayPal in Potential $53 Billion Deal

Quick Facts

• Stripe and Advent offered $60.50 per share for PayPal, valuing the company at $53 billion, but PayPal’s board rejected the bid as too low.
• Talks have continued after the rejection, with the consortium described as the most serious bidder; PayPal shares rose nearly 2% on the news.
• A combined Stripe-PayPal entity would process roughly $3.7 trillion in annual payment volume, drawing likely antitrust scrutiny in the U.S. and Europe.

Stripe and private equity firm Advent International are in active negotiations to acquire PayPal, and a deal could come together in the coming weeks. The Wall Street Journal reported the talks are heating up, citing unnamed sources familiar with the discussions. No binding agreement has been reached and terms remain under discussion.

The initial offer, which surfaced in July 2026, proposed $60.50 per share backed by roughly $50 billion in committed bank financing. That price represented a 28% premium to PayPal’s closing share price at the time. Stripe and Advent are contributing $17 billion in equity, with each firm taking an equal ownership stake if a deal closes.

PayPal’s board formally rejected that offer at a specially convened meeting on July 20, 2026, calling the valuation insufficient. Financial services firm Cantor pegged PayPal’s fair value at closer to $70 per share. Despite the rejection, sources told the Journal that the Stripe-Advent consortium remains the most serious bidder and is still pursuing an agreement.

Advent joined the bid because Stripe, which is privately held, could not fund the full equity portion alone. Stripe was valued at $159 billion in a February 2026 tender offer, up roughly 70% from its $91.5 billion valuation a year earlier. The company processed nearly $1.9 trillion in total payment volume in 2025, a 34% increase year over year, and said it was profitable last year.

PayPal itself handles about $1.8 trillion in annual payment volume. A merger would create an entity processing an estimated $3.7 trillion per year, a scale that would draw significant antitrust review in the United States and likely in Europe.

PayPal has been working with Goldman Sachs and Evercore to evaluate options including a potential sale or breakup. The company has not commented on the latest reports. A Stripe spokesperson said the company does not comment on rumors or speculation.

The talks come as PayPal’s new CEO, Enrique Lores, tries to reverse years of decline. PayPal once held a market capitalization of roughly $360 billion at its 2021 peak. By the time the Stripe-Advent bid became public, that figure had fallen to approximately $42 billion, a drop of more than 88% over five years. Competition from Apple Pay, Google Pay, Klarna, and Stripe’s own Braintree product has eaten into PayPal’s core business.

Lores joined PayPal in March 2026, moving from HP. His predecessor, Alex Chriss, was ousted earlier this year after the board concluded the pace of transformation had fallen short of expectations. Lores is reorganizing the company into three segments: checkout solutions and PayPal, consumer financial services including Venmo, and payment services and crypto. PayPal also plans to cut roughly 4,500 jobs, about 20% of its 23,800-person global workforce, over the next two to three years.

Despite the turmoil, PayPal posted stronger-than-expected results in its most recent quarter. The company reported adjusted profit of $1.38 per share for Q2 2026, beating analyst estimates of $1.28. Revenue rose 5% year over year to $8.68 billion, above the $8.47 billion consensus estimate.

Lores addressed the acquisition speculation on the July 28 earnings call. “If we see levers or a path that we believe would create superior value for our shareholders than executing our current strategy, we would, of course, carefully consider them,” he said.

PayPal shares closed up nearly 2% on August 14 following the latest reports on the deal talks.

Read more: Talks to sell PayPal to Stripe and Advent are heating up