Fintech Checkout.com announced on Friday that it reached a $ 12 billion valuation as part of a repurchase program for employees.
On the one hand, very few startups ever achieve Decacorn status, so $ 12 billion is nothing to sneeze at. It is a valuable enough company to have landed its founder and CEO Guillaume Pousaz on Forbes’ billionaire list.
On the other hand, there was a short period in which Checkout.com was valued at a huge $ 40 billion, as part of its $ 1 billion series D round, which was closed by 2022. By the end of that year, with Venture World crashing into a bear market, it had already cut its valuation to $ 11 billion. And then it lowered its valuation again to $ 9.35 billion in 2023, a spokesman for the company told TechCrunch.
So $ 12 billion represents an increase of almost 30% from its previous valuation.
But this valuation is not achieved because an investor plunks in cash. The company is the only one who buys employee shares back, without other investors involved in a bid, the spokesman says. Instead, the valuation comes from a 409A value, the person said. It is an assessment made by an independent third party. It is not the same as a confidence in a professional investor, but it is also not just the company that gives itself a shock.
In Justice, Checkout.com’s archive strip also had his own decline to valuation during the same Venture Capital Bear Market, crashing from $ 95 billion at the height of foam in 2021 to $ 50 billion during the Doldrums in 2023. Stripe has since itching to $ 91.5 billion from February through his own series of employee range. However, Stripe had external investors who helped appreciate it. And Stripe was joked to work on another offer of a valuation of $ 106.7 billion, Axios reported just.
Still, just because checkout.com is competing against one of the most valued startups of all time, does not minimize its own business results.
The London-based payment company, which is a popular choice among large e-commerce sites such as eBay and Pinterest, said it began to be profitable by the end of 2024 and is on the field for a whole year of profitability in 2025. Checkout.com says it processes about $ 1 billion worth of e-commerce payments a day and rented 300 more employees in People on 19 global interest rates.
Checkout.com also tells TechCrunch that employees with a period of employment of at least one year are eligible for the repurchase program, but refused to indicate the amount of repurchase, either in total consumption or number of shares.
Note: This story was updated with more information about the previous valuation.