Checkout.com, the London-headquartered payments firm, launched an employee share repurchase scheme based on a new internal valuation of $12 billion on 26 September 2025. The programme provides staff with an opportunity to sell their equity holdings at the assessed price, offering a liquidity mechanism for employees who have been holding shares in the company for a number of years without any prospect of a near-term public listing.
The $12 billion figure marks a significant contraction from the $40 billion valuation that Checkout.com carried at its Series D funding round in January 2022, a transaction that made it one of the most highly valued private fintech companies in the world. The gap between those two numbers reflects the severe repricing that has affected high-growth, high-multiple technology businesses as interest rates rose sharply from the pandemic-era lows that had helped inflate valuations across the private market landscape.
VOLUME STRENGTH AMID VALUATION PRESSURE
Despite the headline reduction in valuation, Checkout.com's operational metrics continue to reflect a sizeable and active business. The company processes approximately $1 billion in e-commerce transactions every day, a volume that places it among the leading independent payment processors globally and that serves as evidence the business has continued to grow even as investors reassessed its worth in the context of a higher cost of capital environment.
Checkout.com has stated a target of reaching profitability in 2025, a goal that management has been working towards as the company shifted its strategic emphasis from maximising customer acquisition and revenue growth to improving unit economics and achieving a sustainable operating model. The profitability target matters because it would give the firm a stronger foundation from which to consider future capital market options, including the initial public offering that has been the subject of market speculation for some time.
The company's daily transaction volumes and its profitability ambitions together shape the investment case for Checkout.com as a business independent of its headline valuation. Management's position has been that the repricing of the company from $40 billion to $12 billion reflects market-wide multiple compression rather than any deterioration in the underlying commercial fundamentals, and that demonstrating profitability will validate that argument to future investors.
EMPLOYEE LIQUIDITY AND THE PRIVATE MARKET QUESTION
The share repurchase is structured primarily to address the needs of employees who joined the company on the basis of equity packages valued at the peak of the funding cycle and who have had limited ability to realise any value from those holdings while Checkout.com remains private. As the gap between the 2022 peak valuation and current market conditions widened over the past three years, the pressure for a liquidity mechanism among the staff cohort has become an increasingly important consideration for the company's management and board.
Grounding the buyback in a clear internal valuation of $12 billion gives the scheme transparency and a defined price at which employees can make informed decisions about whether to sell all or part of their holdings. The mechanism is a common approach among late-stage private companies that want to retain talent without committing to an IPO timeline, and several other large privately held fintech businesses have used similar structures to manage employee expectations during prolonged private market phases.
The buyback does not, however, resolve the broader question of when Checkout.com might pursue a public listing or what form that process might take. By establishing a clear current valuation and offering a structured exit for staff, the company buys itself time to continue building towards its profitability target and to assess market conditions before committing to a timeline for how and where to access public capital in a future transaction.