In the past two weeks, payments giant Stripe announced a tender offer valuing the company at a staggering $159 billion.
At the same time, fintech infrastructure provider Plaid completed a tender offer with an $8 billion valuation.
A few days later, Robinhood's Ventures Fund I listed on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE), allowing retail investors direct access to a basket of private company equities.
These events are interconnected; they reflect a structural shift in how companies access capital, provide liquidity, and ultimately consider going public.
Why is that?
Let's start with Plaid.
Founded in 2013, the company acts as an infrastructure layer connecting consumers' bank accounts to financial apps like Venmo, Robinhood, and Chime. Apps pay Plaid to let users seamlessly connect banks, verify credentials, and share account information. This is particularly valuable in the U.S., where regulations do not mandate banks to share information with third parties (unlike the UK's Open Banking and the EU's PSD2).
In fact, it's reported that half of all Americans have indirectly used Plaid's services through various financial apps. The company's valuation peaked at $13.4 billion in 2021, and it was once planned to be acquired by Visa for $5.3 billion, but regulators ultimately blocked the deal. After being repriced at $6.1 billion in April 2025, its latest $8 billion tender offer reflects a resurgence in momentum. Its revenue is projected to reach $430 million in 2025, with 20% of its new customers now being AI companies.
Meanwhile, Stripe is a payments behemoth founded in 2010 by brothers John and Patrick Collison.
Leveraging a decade of exponential e-commerce growth, the company recently reported stellar 2025 results. Total payment volume reached $1.9 trillion, a 34% year-over-year increase, equivalent to roughly 1.6% of global GDP. While revenue is undisclosed, sources estimate 2024 revenue to be at least $5 billion. Today, Stripe's revenue suite alone (including Stripe Billing, Invoicing, Tax, etc.) is on track to achieve $1 billion in annual recurring revenue (ARR).
Beyond payments, Stripe is actively positioning itself around cryptocurrency and agentic commerce, seeing them as catalysts for online consumption. It acquired stablecoin platform Bridge for $1.1 billion, bought wallet infrastructure provider Privy, and is building Tempo—an L1 blockchain focused on payments, currently being tested by Visa, Nubank, and Klarna. Its latest $159 billion tender offer price represents a 74% increase from last year.
A tender offer is a secondary transaction that allows new or existing investors to buy shares directly from employees and early shareholders. It provides liquidity without diluting the company's equity or incurring the regulatory and structural burdens of an IPO.
Stripe and Plaid are part of a larger trend: companies successfully bypassing public markets in favor of private transactions.
Anthropic is reportedly exploring a tender offer valuing it over $350 billion, while Revolut recently completed an employee share sale at a $75 billion valuation.
In 2025, private secondary market transactions surged to $240 billion, up from $162 billion in 2024. In comparison, global capital raised through traditional IPOs was about $140 billion.
As private capital markets boom, the pace of companies entering public markets has slowed. Companies now wait an average of 16 years to go public, 33% longer than a decade ago. Over the past 12 years, total private market assets have more than doubled to $22 trillion. Some of the world's most valuable companies, including SpaceX and OpenAI, remain private, with valuations large enough to rival or exceed those of major public companies.
This has led to two key market developments:
First, the birth of a new capital market infrastructure layer. We recently analyzed the rise of platforms like Forge and EquityZen, which facilitate secondary trading of private company stock. Charles Schwab acquired Forge for $660 million in November, while Morgan Stanley acquired EquityZen in October (amount undisclosed).
Second, the opening of private markets to retail investors. Robinhood's newly formed Ventures Fund I listed on the NYSE last Friday, raising $658 million and holding shares in large private companies like Ramp, Stripe, and Revolut. This isn't the first; Destiny Tech100 listed in March 2024, offering a portfolio of 100 VC-backed companies, including SpaceX and OpenAI. But Robinhood can distribute directly to its 28 million users, and as with its performance in public stocks, it has a proven track record of popularizing asset classes historically reserved for institutional investors.
Beyond this, the Trump administration signed an executive order last summer paving the way for $8.7 trillion in 401(k) retirement accounts to invest in alternative assets like cryptocurrency and private markets.
We see these as major catalysts for further growth, but they also expose some hidden risks.
One is the structural complexity behind purchasing private stock. Brokers often bundle these stocks into their own special purpose vehicles (SPVs) and charge fees, and these SPVs sometimes hold positions in other vehicles. These overlapping counterparty risks and fees can obscure what assets investors actually own. The next macroeconomic downturn will be accompanied by the unraveling of SPV positions and ensuing litigation.
Then there's the issue of valuation transparency. Valuations of private companies are often anchored to the most recent funding round, which may only happen once or twice a year. This limits price discovery and creates a gap between the reported net asset value (NAV) and the price public markets are willing to pay.
The Financial Times recently reported that Robinhood's Ventures Fund I fell 11% on its first day of trading. Meanwhile, Destiny Tech 100 once traded at nearly 20 times its NAV. This unpredictability is not ideal for retirement savings accounts.
Meanwhile, regulators are beginning to push for reforms to make public markets more attractive. SEC Commissioner Hester Peirce expressed concerns about private markets in a February speech: the pressure for companies to go public has diminished, but private markets lack equivalent price discovery, accessibility, and liquidity.
SEC Chairman Paul Atkins recently proposed a three-pillar plan to "make IPOs great again" (his words) by easing disclosure requirements and reforming securities litigation. Whether these reforms will materialize remains to be seen.
Private transactions aside, IPOs did see a significant rebound in 2025. Eleven VC-backed fintech companies, including Circle and Klarna, have gone public, with more on the way. Kraken and Bitgo have filed confidentially, while companies like Ramp and Gusto are preparing by cleaning up cap tables, hiring new CFOs, or engaging investment banks. F-Prime estimates the total market cap of fintech could grow from $947 billion to $1.2 trillion.
Whether these companies can get their desired price is another matter. By year-end, only 2 of the 11 companies were trading above their IPO price. Chime, once privately valued at $25 billion, went public at $13.5 billion. Klarna listed at $17.3 billion but ended the year at $10.9 billion.
With heightened geopolitical tensions and an uncertain macro outlook, companies still on the sidelines may find that the tender offer playbook is the path of least resistance. For now, at least, liquidity in private markets remains ample enough to absorb the supply of these unicorns.
