PayPal

PayPal began in December 1998 as Confinity, merged with X.com in 2000 and was bought by eBay in 2002. It was spun off from eBay and listed on Nasdaq in 2015, and it is headquartered in San Jose, California.

It runs digital payments for consumers and merchants: the PayPal wallet and checkout, Venmo for person-to-person payments in the US, Braintree payment processing for large merchants, Xoom international money transfers and the Honey shopping extension. It also offers pay-later loans, the Fastlane guest checkout and the PayPal USD stablecoin.

According to its annual report for 2025, PayPal had about 23,800 employees at the end of the year, about 9,600 of them in the US; 46% work in the Americas, 42% in Asia-Pacific and 12% in Europe and the Middle East. Its largest technology centres outside the US are in Chennai and Bangalore, with further teams in Dublin, Berlin, Luxembourg, Singapore, Shanghai and Mexico City, and in Austin, Scottsdale, Omaha, Chicago and New York in the US.