Patrick Collison

The founder-CEO of Stripe

Patrick Collison is the co-founder and chief executive of Stripe, the payments company he started in 2010 with his younger brother John. Stripe describes itself as a technology company that builds programmable financial infrastructure so that any business can start and scale more cheaply, and says more than 5 million businesses, from solo founders to large enterprises, build on it. The company says it processes trillions of dollars a year, a figure it equates to about 1.7 percent of global GDP.^[1][2]

Early life and education

Collison was born on September 9, 1988 in Limerick, Ireland, and attended Gaelscoil Aonach Urmhumhan and then Castletroy College. In 2004 he finished as individual runner-up at the Young Scientist exhibition with an artificial-intelligence project, and in January 2005, aged 16, he won the BT Young Scientist and Technology Exhibition outright with Croma, a LISP-style programming language. He went on to MIT but left in 2009 after starting businesses.^[1]

From Auctomatic to Stripe

In 2007 Patrick and John founded Shuppa in Limerick. After Y Combinator showed interest the company moved to California, merged with Harjeet and Kulveer Taggar, and became Auctomatic, which was sold to Live Current Media in March 2008. Patrick then became director of engineering at the buyer's Vancouver base.^[1][4]

TechCrunch's 2012 profile traced Stripe to Patrick's frustration with accepting payments on the web. The brothers began work in early 2010, built a simple solution and processed a first transaction within two weeks. They first partnered with an existing payments company but concluded that they needed to control every part of the experience themselves. By fall 2010 Stripe was their full-time work, and it launched publicly in fall 2011 with more than a thousand developers on a waiting list, growth that came largely through word of mouth. Wikipedia lists Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz and SV Angel among the 2011 investors.^[4][1]

Valuation and scale

Stripe's valuation reached $9.2 billion in a November 2016 round and $35 billion in September 2019, when it raised $250 million. The brothers together hold a controlling interest. In February 2026 Stripe announced a tender offer for current and former employees at a $159 billion valuation, funded mostly by investors including Thrive Capital, Coatue and Andreessen Horowitz, with some of Stripe's own capital used to repurchase shares.^[1][3]

Stripe's 2025 annual letter reported $1.9 trillion in total volume for the year, up 34 percent from 2024 and roughly 1.6 percent of global GDP. The company said it remained robustly profitable, shipped more than 350 product updates, and that its Revenue suite, which covers billing, invoicing and tax, was on track for a $1 billion annual run rate in 2026. It also said it powers 90 percent of the Dow Jones Industrial Average and 80 percent of the Nasdaq 100.^[3]

Stablecoins, agents and new businesses

The same letter described Stripe's bets on new payment rails. Stablecoin payments volume roughly doubled in 2025 to about $400 billion, and Bridge, the stablecoin platform Stripe acquired a year earlier, more than quadrupled its volume. Stripe bought Privy, which powers more than 110 million programmable wallets, in July 2025 and unveiled Tempo, a payments-focused blockchain incubated with Paradigm, in September.^[3]

On artificial intelligence, Stripe built the Agentic Commerce Protocol with OpenAI and a suite that lets merchants sell through multiple AI interfaces with one integration, and it powers shopping inside ChatGPT. It also reported that Stripe Atlas incorporated about a quarter of new Delaware corporations and that the 2025 cohort of new businesses on Stripe grew about 50 percent faster than the 2024 cohort.^[3]

Science, progress and philanthropy

Collison has been a public advocate for faster scientific progress. In November 2018 he and Michael Nielsen wrote in The Atlantic that rising research spending had not produced proportionate output, and in July 2019 he and the economist Tyler Cowen argued there for a discipline of Progress Studies. In April 2020 the two launched Fast Grants to fund COVID-19 research quickly.^[1]

In 2021 he co-founded the Arc Institute, a nonprofit biomedical research organization, with Silvana Konermann and Patrick Hsu. TIME reported that Arc launched with a $650 million endowment from Collison and other donors including Vitalik Buterin, Dustin Moskovitz and Cari Tuna, and gives scientists multi-year funding with no strings attached. TIME included him in its 2025 TIME100 Philanthropy list, describing speed as the byword of his giving. Wikipedia notes that in 2026 Arc published the first AI-designed viral genome in Science.^[1][5]

Personal and recent notes

Wikipedia reports that Collison married the Swiss-American biochemist Silvana Konermann in April 2022; the two met at the 2004 EU Young Scientist competition, and he lives in San Francisco. It also cites a Forbes-based net worth estimate of $17.5 billion in August 2026.^[1]

Boards and policy work

Collison joined the board of Meta Platforms in April 2025. In 2026 he co-founded the Rhine Group, a policy forum and think tank, with former Italian prime minister Mario Draghi. In 2018 Stripe gave $1 million to California YIMBY, a housing-advocacy group.^[1]

Why he matters

Collison is one of the few founders to run a company of Stripe's size through its whole life from the first line of code. The volumes Stripe publishes make it a close proxy for internet commerce, and its moves into stablecoins and agent-driven payments set the agenda for how businesses expect to be paid. Beyond Stripe, his funding and writing have helped make the speed of scientific discovery a mainstream topic in technology circles.^[2][3][5]

On The Executive List

Patrick Collison is ranked No. 45 on The Executive List (October 2026) in the Chief Executive Officers discipline. The ranking reflects The Executive Review's own editorial Trending Score; it is not an outside award, and placement on the list is never sold. View the October 2026 edition.