U.S.-based payments giant PayPal has reportedly been extended an acquisition offer by Stripe and Advent this week. The two companies have proposed to buy PayPal’s extensive business for $53 billion, Reuters reported citing sources familiar with the development.
The unified bid was presented to PayPal earlier this month, pricing it at $60.50 a share. This would represent around 28 percent premium over its most recent closing price. The buyout offer is supported by roughly $50 billion in secured bank funding.
Both, Stripe as well as Advent, have been trying to pursue PayPal to sell off its business since April. If the deal does go through, each of the acquiring companies would keep 50 percent of PayPal with themselves.
PayPal was founded in 1998 as a security company called Confinity. It launched its digital payments system in 1999 and rebranded to PayPal in 2001 after a key merger with Elon Musk’s banking startup X.com.
Amid changing macroeconomic headwinds and intensified competition with fintech players, PayPal has repeatedly suffered from stock drops and shrinking profit margins.
In 2025, the California-headquartered company clocked a four perceny YoY spike in its revenue of $33.2 billion and a net income of $5.23 billion. Despite the profits, PayPal’s stock did register a fall in its price owing to missed Q4 targets.
A similar earnings pattern repeated for PayPal in its Q1 earnings of this year. Despite roping-in a revenue of $8.4 billion with a seven percent YoY increase, its shares declined as the company initiated restructuring. The company CEO Enrique Lores essentially divided the company into three business units to reorganize leadership roles and operative flows.
In the coming two to three years, the platform reportedly plans to reduce 20 percent of its workforce — eliminating over 4,700 roles.
For now, it remains unclear of PayPal would consider accepting this buyout option by Stripe and Advent. None of the companies have publicly accepted or denied the reported developments as of press time.
The reports of this potential deal, however, did spike PayPal’s stock price by 16.3 percent in the last 24 hours. At the time of writing, the PYPL stock was trading on Nasdaq for $55.4 with an eight percent profit.
Source: Yahoo Finance
Aiming to stay relevant in the broader tech and finance ecosystems, PayPal has forayed into the rapidly emerging sectors of stablecoins and AI. In 2023, it launched its own USD-pegged stablecoin dubbed PYUSD. The platform is also working to stitch AI into its offerings to let its users tap agentic commerce.
