I recently saw Stripe's 2025 annual summary, and the numbers are truly astonishing. Their total transaction volume reached $1.9 trillion, a 34% increase compared to 2024. This Stripe transaction volume now accounts for 1.6% of the global GDP, highlighting the importance of payment infrastructure in the global economy.

Even more interesting is the scale of their services. The platform now supports over 5.5 million businesses, including a bunch of top AI companies, 90% of the blue-chip stocks in the Dow Jones Industrial Average, and 80% of the tech companies in the Nasdaq 100. Their Link payment tool has already covered over 200 million users, which is quite widespread.

From a product perspective, they launched over 350 updates last year, showing frequent activity. Notably, two acquisitions stand out—Privy, which supports over 110 million programmable wallets, and Metronome, which specializes in complex billing models and has been adopted by giants like OpenAI, Anthropic, and NVIDIA. After being integrated into the Revenue suite, the latter is expected to reach $1 billion in annual revenue this year.

Another detail is that they directly integrated sandbox environments into their AI development tools, with over 100k sets created so far. The number of companies registered through Stripe Atlas increased by 41% year-over-year, with one-fifth of startups completing their first transaction within 30 days. This indicates that the growth of Stripe's transaction volume is not just driven by large corporations; the activity within the startup ecosystem is also pushing the entire platform upward.

This development trajectory reflects a trend—payment is no longer just a transaction tool but a fundamental infrastructure of the entire fintech ecosystem.