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 .

So $12 billion represents a billion-dollar step up from that.

But this valuation isn’t being obtained because an investor is plunking down ca

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