Analysis
Talks to sell PayPal to Stripe and Advent International are heating up again, TechCrunch reported Friday, with negotiations that 'never stopped' since PayPal's board rejected an earlier joint bid now advancing toward what could be a deal within weeks.
The last confirmed number on the table was $53 billion, or roughly $60.50 a share -- a bid PayPal's board met to weigh in July and ultimately turned down. What's changed since then is tone, not price: on PayPal's most recent earnings call, CEO Enrique Lores said the company remained "open and objective" to evaluating acquisition offers, language that read at the time as leaving room for a renegotiated bid rather than a hard no. TechCrunch's Friday report is the first confirmation that Stripe and Advent actually took that opening.
The Advent piece of the structure is worth sitting with. Stripe alone acquiring a public payments competitor the size of PayPal would invite antitrust scrutiny that a PE-backed structure can partly sidestep -- Advent International bringing buyout capital alongside Stripe's payments infrastructure suggests a deal where Advent could hold the controlling equity stake while Stripe supplies technology integration and, likely, board influence rather than outright ownership. That's a materially different regulatory profile than a straight strategic acquisition, and it's probably why this structure is the one that survived the summer's rejection instead of a fresh all-Stripe bid.
“TechCrunch's Friday report is the first confirmation that Stripe and Advent actually took that opening.”
For context on scale: a completed deal near the prior $53 billion mark would be among the largest fintech M&A transactions on record, eclipsing Goldman Sachs' $2.25 billion NEOS acquisition and dwarfing most of the payments-sector consolidation seen earlier this year. It would also hand Stripe -- a company PayPal spent a decade positioning against as the scrappier, more developer-friendly rival -- a direct stake in the incumbent it was built to disrupt.
What the 'heating up' framing overstates: no price has been confirmed, no term sheet has been signed, and 'talks heating up' has described this exact situation before, in mid-July, when it took weeks to produce a board meeting rather than a deal. Renewed urgency is not yet a signed agreement, and PayPal's board has already shown once that it's willing to hold out for a higher number rather than accept the first structure on the table.
Watch PayPal's next investor update for any language change from "open and objective" toward something more specific -- that shift, more than any leak about Advent's involvement, will be the signal that a number has actually been agreed.