Fintech Checkout.com announced on Friday that it reached a $12 billion valuation as part of an employee stock buyback program. 

On the one hand, very few startups ever achieve decacorn status, so $12 billion is nothing to sneeze at. It’s a valuable enough company to have landed its founder and CEO Guillaume Pousaz on Forbes’ billionaire list.

On the other, there was a short period of time when Checkout.com was valued at a whopping $40 billion, as part of its $1 billion Series D round closed in 2022. By the end of that year, with the venture world crashing into a bear market, it had already internally slashed its valuation to $11 billion. And then it lowered its valuation again, to $9.35 billion in 2023, a company spokesperson told TechCrunch.

So $12 billion represents a nearly 30% increase from its previous valuation.

But this valuation isn’t being obtained because an investor is plunking down cash. The company is the only one buying employee shares back, with no other investors involved in a tender offer, the spokesperson tells us. Instead, the valuation comes from a 409A valuation, the person said. That’s an assessment made by an independent third-party. It’s not the same as a vote of confidence from a professional investor, but it’s also not simply the company giving itself a bump.

In fairness, Checkout.com’s archrival Stripe also had its own valuation setback during the same venture capital bear market, crashing from $95 billion at the height of the froth in 2021, to $50 billion during the doldrums in 2023. Stripe has since clawed its way back to $91.5 billion as of February through its own series of employee tender offers. Stripe, however, did have outside investors helping to value it. And, Stripe is rumored to be working on yet another tender offer at a $106.7 billion valuation, Axios just reported.  

Yet just because Checkout.com is competing against one of the most highly valued startups of all time, doesn’t minimize its own business achievements. 

The London-based payments company, which is a popular choice among large e-commerce sites like eBay and Pinterest, said it was starting to be profitable by the end of 2024 and is on track for a full year of profitability in 2025. Checkout.com says it processes about $1 billion worth of e-commerce payments a day and hired 300 more employees this year, bringing headcount to 2,000 people across 19 global offices. 

Checkout.com also tells TechCrunch that employees with tenure of at least a year will be eligible for the buyback program, but declined to indicate the size of the buyback, either in total spend or number of shares.

Note: This story was updated with more information about the previous valuation.