A PayPal spokesperson told Fortune that they are ‘exploring strategic options’ for their corporate VC arm.

Global fintech PayPal is reportedly shutting down its venture capital arm, just months after the company tapped HP’s Enrique Lores to replace Alex Chriss as CEO.

Founded in 2002, PayPal Ventures shrunk from more than 10 partners in 2025 to now only two, Fortune reported, citing an archived version of the company’s website. Moreover, the page that listed the unit’s employees is no longer available, the publication also found.

Earlier this month, Ashish Aggarwal and Alexandros Bottenbruch, co-leads for fintech investments across EMEA left their roles as partners at PayPal Ventures. Aggarwal and Bottenbruch were the only two partners based out of the company’s London office, with the rest situated in the US.

PayPal Ventures has backed dozens of companies across fintech and payments, commerce enablement, AI, blockchain, cryptocurrency and cyber technology. It has invested $850m into more than 80 companies to date.

A company spokesperson told Fortune that they are “exploring strategic options” for their corporate venture capital arm. According to the publication, PayPal is also considering selling some of its positions on the secondary market.

PayPal shares gained more than 2.7pc at market close yesterday (16 June), and an additional nearly 0.5pc in after-hours trading. The marginal increase, however, comes as company shares dropped nearly 40pc since last year and more than 83pc in the past five years.

The fintech has been making concerted efforts to reverse its financial downturn this year with Lores at the helm as the new CEO.

According to a company statement in February, the “pace of change and execution [under Chriss] was not in line with the board’s expectations”. Chriss was appointed to his role in late 2023.

PayPal posted a net revenue growth of 7pc to $8.4bn in the first quarter of 2026. Last quarter, it reported $8.68bn in revenue, lower than London Stock Exchange Group analysts’ average estimates, but marginally higher when compared to the same quarter the year before.

The company struck an agentic commerce deal with OpenAI last year to enable instant payments for buyers within ChatGPT.

Earlier this year, Bloomberg reported that Stripe – the Irish fintech unicorn – expressed interest in acquiring PayPal.

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Enrique Lores at the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting 2022 in Davos. Image: World Economic Forum/Ciaran McCrickard via Flickr (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)