With the market having changed dramatically since the heyday of 2021’s venture funding boom, fintech valuations have largely shifted accordingly.
With only a few exceptions, the once most valuable companies operating in the fintech space have seen their valuations drop significantly, based on secondary share activity as analyzed by Notice.co, a company that has built a pricing tool for the private markets.
One of the starkest examples of declines lies in payments giant Stripe, which saw its funding valuation hit $95 billion in March 2021. The company’s secondary market valuation peaked at nearly $200 billion in January 2022 (!), according to Notice’s data, which understandably caused frustration among employees who wondered why the company didn’t go public at that time. But as of the time of this writing, its secondary market valuation has plunged by 73% to $52.5 billion.
Only three fintech startups have actually seen their secondary valuations increase since January 2022: HR/payroll startups Rippling, Gusto and Deel. Those companies have seen their valuations climb by 103% (to $13.2 billion), 5% (to $10 billion) and 37% (to $6.5 billion), respectively, according to Notice.
Greg Martin (a co-founder and managing director at Rainmaker Securities, a secondaries trading platform) told TechCrunch+ that while some fintech unicorns are really solid businesses that were just a little overpriced, others haven’t come fully back down to earth yet. “Other people who are hanging on to their valuation are probably going to take longer to hit the bottom and find their way back up and have momentum,” Martin said.
Sparking momentum
The private markets are a great way to understand how companies are doing between funding rounds, said Notice founder and CEO Tyson Hendricksen.