Spirits were high when Dutch payments firm Adyen floated on the Amsterdam stock exchange in 2018.
The company was riding a wave of growth in Europe’s technology sector and snapping up competition from its mega U.S. rival PayPal.
Since then, the company has weathered a turbulent ride, including a global pandemic that knocked volumes from travel clients significantly.
The firm expanded aggressively in North America, where some of its most high-profile merchants are based, and hired hundreds of employees to turbocharge growth.
As the macroeconomic environment shifted in 2023, Adyen’s growth strategy has been challenged in a big way.
The company’s shares plummeted 39% on Thursday, erasing 18 billion euros ($20 billion) from Adyen’s market capitalization, as investors dumped the stock after the firm reported its slowest revenue growth on record.
The stock closed down a further 2.9% on Friday after the precipitous decline of Thursday.
It also sells point-of-sale systems for physical stores and handles payments online and in-store.
More than a processor, Adyen is what is known as a payment gateway — meaning it uses technology to enable merchants to take card payments and transactions through online stores.
The company takes a small cut off every deal that runs through its platform.
It was co-founded by Pieter van der Does, the firm’s chief executive officer, and Arnout Schuijff, former chief technology officer.
Analyst had expected 853.6 million euros of revenue and 40% of year-on-year growth, according to Refinitiv Eikon forecasts.
Adyen has typically been viewed as a growth stock, after consistently reporting revenue growth of 26% each half-year period since its 2018 stock market debut.
“With higher inflation, leading to higher interest rates, there has been a bit of a shift of focus — less focus on growth, more focus on bottom line,” Adyen’s chief financial officer, Ethan Tandowsky, told CNBC’s “Squawk Box Europe” on Thursday.
Tandowsky insisted that the company had “limited churn” and that none of its large customers had left the platform.
But concerns that competitors in local markets, particularly in North America, are muscling in with cheaper offerings have heavily weighed on company prospects.
Adyen said in a letter to shareholders last week that its EBITDA (earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization) margin fell to 43% in the first half of 2023 from 59% in the same period a year ago.
The company said this was down to softer growth in North America and to higher employment costs such as wages, as it ramped up hiring during the period.
Tandowsky insisted the company had more of a focus on “functionality” than its peers, even though those peers may offer cheaper services.
“The efficiency of which we can develop new functionality, functionality that outperforms our peers will lead us to gaining the market share that we expect.”
Structural challenges
At the heart of Adyen’s woes is a business heavily dependent on customers’ willingness to stick to a single platform for their all their payment needs. The company also needs to convince those users that what it sells is better than what’s on offer from a competitor.
In its half-year 2023 report, Adyen said that many of its North American customers are cutting back on costs to weather economic pressures like rising interest rates and higher inflation.
“Enterprise businesses prioritized cost optimization, while competition for digital volumes in the region provided savings over functionality,” Adyen said in a letter to shareholders.
“These dynamics are not new, and online volumes are easiest to transition back and forth. Amid these developments, we consciously continued to price for the value we bring.”
Adyen also said its profitability had suffered from a push to aggressively ramp up hiring. EBITDA came in at 320 million euros, down 10% from the first half of 2022.
Adyen added 551 employees in the first half of the year, taking its total full-time employee count up to 3,883.
Some of the company’s rivals have cut back on hiring significantly. In November 2022, Stripe laid off 14% of its workforce, or about 1,100 people.
The main challenge Adyen now faces is competition from challengers that are willing to offer lower rates than it provides.
Speaking with the Financial Times on Thursday, Adyen CEO van der Does said that merchants are “trying to explore local providers” to cut down on costs.
“It’s not that we’re shrinking — we’re just growing at a slower rate,” he added.
Adyen has historically been a lean business, opting to hire fewer people overall than its main competitor Stripe, which has roughly double the staffing.
Simon Taylor, head of strategy at Sardine.ai, said Adyen might face a “natural ceiling” to what business size it can reach before having to reduce its margins to grow again.
“Ultimately they’re subject to the same macro headwinds everyone in e-commerce is,” Taylor told CNBC. “And they still grew 21%. Incumbents would kill for that.”
Navan, the business travel, payments, and expense management startup, filed on Friday afternoon to go public.
Its S-1 filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission indicates that the company plans to list on the Nasdaq Global Select Market under the symbol “NAVN.”
Navan reported trailing 12-month revenue of $613 million (up 32%) across over 10,000 customers, and gross bookings of $7.6 billion (up 34%), according to the S-1 filing.
Goldman Sachs and Citigroup will act as lead book-running managers for the proposed offering.
Navan ranked No. 39 on this year’s CNBC Disruptor 50 list, and also made the 2024 list.
The IPO market has bounced back this year, with deal activity up 56% across 156 deals (roughly 200 IPO filings in all) and $30 billion in proceeds, up over 23% year over year, according to IPO tracker Renaissance Capital. It has been the best year for IPOs since 2021, though still far below the Covid offering boom years, when over $142 billion (2021) and $78 billion (2020) was raised by IPOs.
This year’s deal flow has been highlighted by hot AI names like Coreweave, as well as some of the startup world’s most highly valued firms from the past decade, such as fintech Klarna and design firm Figma, crypto companies Circle, Bullish and Gemini, and some long-awaited IPO candidates finally hitting the market, such as Stubhub this week, though its shares have slumped since the first day of trading. Top Amazon reseller Pattern went public on Friday.
Launched by CEO Ariel Cohen and co-founder Ilan Twig in 2015, Navan set out to disrupt a business travel sector where incumbents relied on clunky legacy tools and fragmented workflows.
The Palo Alto-based company, formerly called TripActions, refers to itself as an “all-in-one super app” for corporate travel and expenses.
Customers include Unilever, Adobe, Christie’s, Blue Origin and Geico.
It has also been pushing further into AI, with a virtual assistant named Ava handling approximately 50% of user interactions during the six months ended July 31, according to the filing, and a proprietary AI framework called Navan Cognition supporting its platform, as well as proprietary cloud infrastructure.
“We built Navan for the road warriors, for CEOs and CFOs who understand travel’s critical importance to their strategy, the finance teams who demand precision and control, the executive assistants juggling itineraries, and the program admins ensuring seamless events,” the co-founders wrote in an IPO filing letter.
“We saw firsthand the frustration of clunky, outdated systems. Travelers were forced to cobble together solutions, wait for hours on hold to book or change travel, and negotiate with travel agents. They struggled to adhere to company policies, with little visibility into those policies, and after all that, they spent even more time on tedious expense reports after a trip. We felt the pain of finance teams struggling to gain visibility into fragmented travel spending and to enforce policies, and the frustration of suppliers unable to connect directly with the high-value business travelers they sought to serve,” they wrote in the filing.
Revenue grew 33% year-over-year from $402 million in fiscal 2024 to $537 million in fiscal 2025, according to the S-1 filing. The company reported a net loss that decreased 45% year-over-year from $332 million in fiscal 2024 to $181 million in fiscal 2025. Gross margin improved from 60% in fiscal 2024 to 68% in fiscal 2025.
The business travel and expense space is crowded, with fellow Disruptors Ramp and Brex, and TravelPerk, as well as incumbents like SAP Concur and American Express Global Business Travel.
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A gamer plays soccer title Pro Evolution Soccer 2019 on an Xbox console.
Sezgin Pancar | Anadolu Agency via Getty Images
Microsoft said on Friday that it will increase the recommended retail price of several Xbox consoles in the U.S. starting in October because of “changes in the macroeconomic environment.”
The company said it would not increase prices for accessories such as controllers and headsets, and that prices in other countries would stay the same.
While Microsoft didn’t explicitly attribute the increase to the Trump administration’s tariffs, many consumer companies have been warning for months that higher prices are on the way. President Donald Trump has issued tariffs this year on multiple countries with a stated goal to bring more manufacturing to the U.S.
“We understand that these changes are challenging, and they were made with careful consideration,” Microsoft said on its website.
It’s the second time Microsoft has raised prices on its consoles in the U.S. this year. Rivals Sony and Nintendo have also raisedconsole prices in the U.S. as Trump’s tariffs went into effect.
Ticket reseller StubHub signage on display at the New York Stock Exchange for the company’s IPO on Sept. 17, 2025.
NYSE
After a long wait to get public, StubHub has had a rough start to life on the New York Stock Exchange.
Shares of the online ticket vendor dropped 10% on Friday, falling for a third straight day since debuting on Wednesday. At $18.46, the stock is now down 21% from its IPO price of $23.50.
StubHub, trading under ticker symbol “STUB,” has lagged behind fellow market newcomers like online lender Klarna, design software company Figma and stablecoin issuer Circle, which delivered early returns for investors following their recent IPOs. Shares of cybersecurity firm Netskope also rose 10% on Friday in their second trading day, after an initial pop on Thursday.
StubHub had been trying to go public for the past several years, but delayed its debut twice. The most recent stall came in April after President Donald Trump’s announcement of sweeping tariffs roiled markets. The company filed an updated prospectus in August, effectively restarting the process to go public, and has since seen its market cap slip to about $6.8 billion from $8.6 billion at its IPO.
Founded in 2000, StubHub primarily generates revenue from connecting buyers with ticket resellers. In the first quarter, revenue rose 10% from a year earlier to $397.6 million. The company’s net loss widened to $35.9 million from $29.7 million a year ago.
StubHub CEO Eric Baker told CNBC on Wednesday that the company expects recently introduced federal regulations around transparent ticket pricing to cause a “one-time” hit to its financial results.
Regulators are zeroing in on online ticket sellers over their pricing mechanisms and whether the companies are doing enough to keep automated purchasing bots in check. The Federal Trade Commission on Thursday sued StubHub rival Live Nation Entertainment, the parent company of Ticketmaster, accusing it of illegal resale tactics.
While StubHub has failed to excite Wall Street, its struggles haven’t seeped into other deals as the tech IPO market continues to show signs of a resurgence after an extended dry spell. Amazon reseller Pattern Group saw its stock rise 12% on Friday, though shares initially slipped 6%.