Braintree is owned by PayPal (the United States, NASDAQ: PYPL), which has held the brand since 19 December 2013, when eBay acquired it, as part of a $713 million deal that also included Venmo.[1][2] Braintree was founded in 2007 in Chicago, Illinois and was independent until 2013.
Braintree processes card payments for other companies rather than for consumers, and its customers have included Uber and Airbnb. PayPal acquired it in 2013 for about $800 million, which also brought Venmo into the group. Keeping it separate from the consumer PayPal brand lets the group serve merchants who would rather their checkout did not advertise a competitor's wallet at the point of sale.
What PayPal's annual report says about Braintree
Sentences about Braintree from PayPal's latest annual filing[1], copied word for word.
The increase in TPV for Braintree products and services despite a decline in the number of payment transactions is due to our strategic shift as we focus on profitable growth.
As a result of our stronger focus on profitable growth and ongoing negotiations with merchants, we experienced lower volume and transaction revenue from our Braintree offerings in the first half of 2025 followed by revenue and TPV growth in the second half of 2025.
Transaction expense increased $290 million, or 2%, in 2025 compared to 2024 due to the increase in TPV of 7%, partially offset by favorable changes in merchant mix to lower cost merchants within our Braintree products and services.
How often PayPal names Braintree in its annual report
A plain count of the times the name appears in the text of each annual report, not counting the start of a sentence. A brand that an owner writes about more is usually one it treats as central. The brand is named more often than it was three years earlier.
PayPal is a publicly listed company headquartered in San Jose, California, United States, founded in 1998. Brandtree records 4 brands under its control, and it is listed as NASDAQ: PYPL.
PayPal grew out of a 2000 merger between Confinity and Elon Musk's X.com, was bought by eBay in 2002, and was spun back out as a separate company in 2015. Its early employees went on to found or fund a striking share of the companies that followed, a group the press calls the PayPal Mafia.
Brandtree records a controlling owner for 2,549 brands that began in the United States.
478 of them (19%) are now controlled by a company headquartered in another country; Braintree is not one of them.
eBay bought Braintree for its PayPal business for about $713 million, mostly in cash, to accelerate PayPal in mobile payments. Venmo came with it: Braintree had bought the peer-to-peer payments app the year before, and eBay's annual report describes Venmo as a Braintree subsidiary. Both moved to PayPal when it separated from eBay in 2015, which is why a purchase made by eBay explains who owns Venmo today.
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