Stripe’s 2024 annual letter

“Businesses on Stripe generated 1.4 trillion in total payment volume in 2024, up 38% from the prior year and reaching a scale equivalent to around 1.3% of global GDP.”

“Stripe's revenue and finance automation suite, with billing at its core, has now passed a five hundred million dollar revenue run rate.”

“Billing is being used by more than 300,000 companies, manages nearly two hundred million active subscriptions, and is emerging as the revenue engine of the AI era.”

“From top corporate leaders, half of the Fortune 100 uses Stripe. To hyper-growth companies, we count 80% of the Forbes Cloud 178% of the Forbes AI-fifty as customers. To newly formed upstarts, one in six new Delaware corporations incorporates with Stripe Atlas…”

“In aggregate, the revenue that businesses process on Stripe is growing seven times faster than that of all companies in the S&P 500.”

“Of the 500 companies in the S&P 500 at its inception in 1957, only 53 remain in the index today. More than half of that remaining 53 use stripe.”

“Back in 1957, companies could expect to remain in the index for 61 years. In 1980, the average tenure was 36 years. Today, it's just under 20 years.”

“Turo, the world's largest car sharing marketplace, used our optimized checkout suite and saw a 4.7% increase in recaptured revenue, equivalent to an additional one hundred fourteen million dollars each year.”

“Forbes switched to Stripe to manage its subscription payments, and it has seen a 23% uplift in revenue in the past six months alone.”

“Cursor, the AI-powered coding assistant, raced to over one hundred million dollars in recurring revenue in just three years.”

“We're also seeing the likes of Lovable, which hit seventeen million dollars ARR in just three months, Bolt, achieving twenty million ARR in two months, and Kodo, radically lower the barrier for turning software ideas into working applications.”

“Some people have called these startups LLM wrappers. Those people are missing the point. The O-ring model in economics shows that in a process with interdependent tasks, the overall output or productivity is limited by the least effective component, not just i…”

“Harvey, whose AI legal assistant is used by many Fortune 500 companies, quadrupled revenue in 2024.”

“More than 700 AI agent startups launched on Stripe last year, a figure that we expect will be substantially eclipsed by the total in 2025.”

“By 2023, more independent pizzerias launched in America than in any other year on record.”

“Today, 60% of all small businesses in America use vertical SaaS platforms to help run their business.”

“In the US, 6.3% of SMBs powered by vertical SaaS platforms on Stripe earn one million dollars in total revenue in their first year, nearly 60% more than in one benchmark comparison set.”

“Over a quarter of Australian small businesses are using vertical SaaS, as are nearly a fifth of small businesses in the UK. Other markets like Singapore, 14%, France, eight percent, and Germany, five percent are more nascent, but adoption is growing quickly.”

“When a credit card is used for a payment, there is a greater than 92% chance that Stripe has encountered the same card before.”

“For instance, if we see a card being used with a new email address, The very newness of the email address is a suspicious fact, with a 60% higher likelihood of fraud.”

“With these and other techniques, we reduced card testing on Stripe by over 80% in the past two years, protecting our customers from billions of fraudulent transactions.”

“SpaceX uses Bridge to repatriate funds from Starlink sales in Argentina, Nigeria, and other markets.”

“Stablecoin transaction volumes more than doubled between Q four, 20, 23 and Q four, 20, 24. And the number of monthly active stablecoin wallets has now reached forty million.”

“Stablecoin issuers will, in a similar way, be large buyers of U.S. Debt and create more dollar strength.”

“We further note with interest that despite regulatory uncertainty in the United States, early stablecoin adoption has shown a notable US dollar preference, with an estimated 99% of stablecoin balances being USD-based.”

“While the economies of the US and Europe were similarly productive in 1990, there has since been a stark divergence, with US productivity per hour works reaching 104 dollars, as compared with a plateau of something closer to 85 dollars per hour in Europe.”

“In the US, almost 80% of corporate lending is now from non-bank sources, compared to just 32% in the EU.”

“While the US invests around 0.7% of GDP in high growth firms, that figure is less than 0.3% in Europe.”

“GDPR alone is estimated to have reduced profits for small tech firms in Europe by up to 12%.”