Irish-based payment platform, Stripe, has announced plans to lay off 300 employees, representing approximately 3.5% of its global workforce.
Staff were informed about the layoffs in an email from Stripe’s Chief People Officer, Rob McIntosh. The affected employees are those largely in product, engineering, and operations roles.
Part of the email reads,
“Hi all, as we’ve been working through our plans for 2025, leaders took a close look at their organizations and team structures. It became clear that there were several team-level changes needed to make sure we had the right people in the right roles and locations to execute against our plans. It’s not easy to make all these changes at once, but it’s even harder to have them roll out gradually throughout the year, so we asked leaders to do all they could to pull these decisions forward. As a result, about 300 Stripes, largely in product, engineering, and operations roles, are departing today. All those who are impacted have already been informed, and everyone will receive a severance package, including their earned annual bonus.
“I want to be clear that we’re not slowing down hiring we expect to grow headcount across all our locations and to land at about 10,000 Stripes by the end of the year (a 17% Y/Y increase). Our business performance continues to be strong. Our confidence that this is the right business decision doesn’t make it easier for those who are leaving or those losing valued teammates. I appreciate everyone’s resilience and want to thank those departing for their contributions and for building with us.”
Stripe’s recent layoff of workers is coming after the payment platform cut a few in mid-2023 dozen roles, mostly from its recruiting department. This came after it announced the layoff of 14% of its workers in 2022, impacting around 1,120 of the fintech giant’s 8,000 workforce. The downsizing occurred alongside most of the tech industry, as soaring inflation and rising interest rates forced companies to focus on profits over growth
In a memo published online, Stripe CEO Patrick Collison conveyed a familiar narrative in terms of the reasons behind the latest cutbacks: a major hiring spree spurred by the world’s pandemic-driven surge toward e-commerce, a significant growth period and then an economic downturn ridden with inflation, higher interest rates, and other macroeconomic challenges.
“We were much too optimistic about the internet economy’s near-term growth in 2022 and 2023 and underestimated both the likelihood and impact of a broader slowdown”.
Despite the series of layoffs amid the recent layoff of 300 employees, Stripe which is currently valued at about $70 billion in the private markets, still expects to increase headcount by 10,000 by the end of the year, which would be a 17% increase, and have no plans to slow down hiring.
Founded in September 2010 by brothers Patrick and John Collison, the company grew from a $20 million valuation back in 2011 to a $50 billion valuation in 2023. Notably, the payments giant crossed the $1 trillion total payment volume metric in 2023.
According to various sources, Stripe’s market share in the payment processing industry is estimated to be between 8% and 25%, with a valuation of $65 billion. Stripe continues to say that the company is still early in its journey. It aims “to be the most reliable part of a business’s stack.”
