John and Patrick Collison on Stripe's Growth, Agent Commerce, and the Future of Software

Stripe’s latest annual letter shows the company processed more than $1 trillion in payments and posted a 34 percent revenue surge, driven by a wave of new businesses joining the platform. The 2025 cohort not only grew larger but also delivered higher median revenue per merchant, a trend the founders say could make Q1 2026 the “first quarter of the singularity.” This data‑driven optimism contrasts with broader market volatility, suggesting that Stripe’s developer‑first infrastructure is capturing the fastest‑moving segment of the digital economy.

The conversation turns to “agentic commerce,” where autonomous software agents execute purchases without human input. Collison argues that such agents will demand blockchains capable of billions of transactions per second—far beyond today’s payment rails. Stablecoins and AI are seen as complementary enablers, prompting Stripe’s incubation of Tempo to build a high‑throughput, low‑latency payment layer. By integrating with major retailers and exposing product catalogs through APIs, Stripe aims to make it possible for a ChatGPT‑style assistant to complete a checkout with a single prompt, unlocking a new commerce paradigm.

Underlying these trends is a shift in software economics. Traditional models treated software as a fixed‑cost product with unlimited scaling, reinforcing winner‑take‑all dynamics. The rise of inference costs and on‑the‑fly customization turns software into a “bespoke pizza” that is cooked at the moment of use. This non‑Warlike regime favors platforms that can deliver per‑request compute and payment processing, reshaping SaaS pricing and product strategy. For enterprises, the implication is clear: adopt infrastructure that supports real‑time, agent‑driven transactions or risk falling behind the next wave of digital commerce.