PayPal Ventures is taking a break.
Five sources told Fortune that the corporate venture arm, which was founded in 2016, will be winding down operations. A company spokesperson confirmed the news to TechCrunch, albeit with a nuanced statement:
“As part of our continued efforts to sharpen our focus, we are exploring strategic options for our corporate venture arm,” the spokesperson said in an email.
PayPal Ventures has made more than 80 investments, including the crypto trading platform Talos Global, fintech infrastructure company Plaid, and the crypto bank Anchorage Digital. It has raised $850 million across three funds.
PayPal Ventures still exists on paper and has a few employees supporting its portfolio of startups. However, it has paused new investment activity — at least for now.
The decision follows the departure of PayPal CEO Alex Chriss, who was replaced by Enrique Lores in February. The board said Chriss had failed to keep pace with industry changes and did not meet its expectations. Ironically, the end of PayPal Ventures could mean the company falls further behind. The venture arm gave PayPal a front-row seat to emerging fintech innovation; without it, the company risks losing visibility into startups shaping the future of financial services and falling behind competitors that maintain strategic venture arms.
Lores took the helm with the mission to restructure things, and he has done so, with more cuts and layoffs expected to continue throughout the next few years, Fortune reported. The outlet also said that PayPal is exploring secondary sales to offload some of its venture holdings and has hired Jefferies to help with that task. Lores said in the company’s first-quarter earnings call last month that it needed to “recommit to the fundamentals,” which included “becoming a technology company again.”
It’s clear the company wants to reposition itself in the ecosystem — particularly around AI — which means this may not be the final chapter for corporate venture investing at PayPal.
The PayPal Venture news also comes after the company reached a settlement in May with the Justice Department over the creation of an investment program back in 2020 that targeted Black and minority-owned businesses. Under the settlement, PayPal agreed to waive processing fees for $1 billion of transactions – a value of about $30 million, according to the DOJ. PayPal was also sued in January 2025 by an investor who claimed she was excluded from the investment program because she was Asian. That case looks to be headed toward trial, according to court documents.
This article has been updated to include more information about the portfolio and to clarify that new investments have been paused.
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