At $60.50 a share, the Stripe and Advent PayPal bid lands at a 28% premium to PayPal’s closing price on 15 July 2026, according to CNBC. The joint offer, valued at roughly $53.4 billion in total, was submitted earlier this month by Stripe, the payments infrastructure company, and Advent International, the Boston-based private equity firm.
Reuters first reported the approach. Under the proposal, Stripe and Advent would hold equal stakes in the acquired company. PayPal has not publicly responded to the offer.
Inside the Stripe and Advent PayPal Bid
The financing structure combines equity and bank debt. Stripe, Advent, and Block are collectively contributing $17 billion in equity toward the offer, according to people familiar with the deal cited by CNBC. The bid is also backed by roughly $50 billion in committed bank financing, Reuters reported. CNBC and Reuters both cautioned those figures come from sources close to the discussions rather than from the companies directly.
PayPal has been preparing for exactly this kind of approach. Bloomberg Law reports the company has been working with Goldman Sachs and Evercore to evaluate strategic alternatives, including a potential sale or a breakup. The involvement of two of Wall Street’s more prominent advisory names suggests the process has moved well beyond early-stage consideration.
Bloomberg Law also reports that Stripe is particularly drawn to Venmo, PayPal’s mobile payments brand, which has accumulated a large consumer base in the United States but has historically generated less revenue than its user numbers might imply.
Why PayPal Is in Play
PayPal’s shares have declined more than 40% since the start of last year, according to Yahoo Finance, compressing the company’s market capitalisation and making an acquisition of this scale arithmetically possible where it would not have been two years ago.
The company brought in a new chief executive, Enrique Lores, in March, following a profit warning. Since then, PayPal has announced plans to cut at least $1.5 billion in costs over the next two to three years and has signalled a reduction in its workforce of around 20%.
Lores also moved quickly to reshape the business operationally. On the first-quarter 2026 earnings call, he outlined a reorganisation into three units: Checkout Solutions and PayPal; Consumer Financial Services and Venmo; and Payment Services and Crypto. The full transcript of that call is available via PayPal’s investor relations filing service. The structural separation of Venmo into its own division may have inadvertently made it easier for a buyer to identify and value the asset independently, which is precisely what Bloomberg Law’s reporting suggests Stripe has done.
The deal would unite two platforms that together processed a combined $3.7 trillion in payments in 2025: PayPal handled roughly $1.8 trillion and Stripe processed $1.9 trillion over the same period. PayPal’s network spans around 440 million active accounts. Stripe, privately held, reached a valuation of $159 billion earlier this year.
This is not the first time Stripe has circled PayPal. Reports in February suggested Stripe had been exploring a takeover and was engaged in preliminary discussions, though no formal proposal emerged at that stage. The offer submitted this month is the first structured bid to surface publicly.
The earlier approach also carried a broader strategic logic that has only become more pressing. PayPal’s consumer brand retains mass scale but its merchant infrastructure has lost ground to Stripe’s developer-first model. Combining the two would create a payments group with unmatched reach across both consumer and business segments, though any deal of this size would draw close scrutiny from regulators on both sides of the Atlantic.
PayPal’s most recent quarterly results were filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission in an 8-K dated 5 May 2026. Stripe, Advent, and PayPal did not immediately respond to requests for comment, and the EDGAR Online record of PayPal’s executive compensation filings reflects the scale of the governance changes Lores has overseen since taking the role.
The next meaningful moment is whether PayPal’s board engages formally with the bid or solicits competing offers through the Goldman Sachs and Evercore process. A counter-bid, a breakup plan, or a flat rejection each implies a very different future for a company that, eighteen months ago, was not obviously for sale at any price.
