Stripe says 2025 marked a major inflection point for payments, stablecoins, startups, and AI-driven commerce. In its annual letter, the company said businesses using its infrastructure processed $1.9 trillion in payment volume during the year, up 34% from the previous year and equal to roughly 1.6% of global GDP. More than 5 million businesses now use Stripe directly or through partners, including 90% of the Dow Jones Industrial Average and 80% of the Nasdaq 100.
Global-first startups and cross-border commerce gain momentum
Stripe said startup formation on its platform accelerated further in 2025, with more companies joining than in any prior year. Notably, 57% of those new businesses were based outside the United States. The company argued that internet businesses are increasingly launching with a global-first mindset. Among Stripe companies with mostly international revenue, about 30% of that revenue comes from countries outside both their home market and the world’s ten largest economies. Stripe attributed part of that expansion to localized checkout in more than 100 countries and support for over 120 payment methods, which has reduced friction in cross-border commerce.
On the startup infrastructure side, Stripe Atlas recorded a 41% increase in company formations. Stripe added that 20% of Atlas startups charged their first customer within 30 days, compared with just 8% in 2020. The company also said developers are adopting more AI-native workflows, with more than 100,000 claimable sandboxes created to help move products from prototype to production.
Stablecoin payments expand as Tempo enters testing
For crypto-related payments, Stripe said stablecoins are becoming more meaningful in real commercial use. Even as bitcoin fell notably from its October price highs, stablecoin payment volume doubled in 2025 to roughly $400 billion. Around 60% of that activity was tied to business-to-business transactions. Stripe also said volume on Bridge, the stablecoin orchestration platform it acquired, increased by more than 4x over the same period.
The company also introduced Tempo, a payments-focused blockchain developed with Paradigm. Stripe said the network is designed to deliver sub-second finality, dedicated payment lanes, and compliance integrations. Firms including Visa, Nubank, and Shopify are already testing it for use cases such as global payouts and embedded finance.
Agentic commerce moves toward autonomous buying
The most forward-looking section of the letter focused on agentic commerce, which Stripe defines as AI systems capable of initiating and completing purchases on behalf of users. The company described five stages of development, beginning with simple checkout assistance and extending to fully autonomous buying. To support that shift, Stripe said it partnered with OpenAI on an Agentic Commerce Protocol and launched shared payment tokens so AI agents can transact without exposing sensitive credentials.
Stripe’s founders compared the current moment to the formative internet years of the mid-1990s, when core standards and protocols were still taking shape. Their central argument is that agentic commerce could become similarly transformative, but only if interoperability is achieved across the ecosystem. At the same time, Stripe cautioned that regulation and institutional bottlenecks could slow adoption even as AI expands what commerce systems can do. Its broader message is that while 2026 may still look familiar on the surface, the next decade could be radically different for entrepreneurs, payments infrastructure, and global trade.