Checkout.com’s new $12B valuation is a glass half-full situation  

Fintech Checkout.com announced on Friday that it reached a $12 billion valuation as part of an employee stock buyback program. 

On the one hand, very few startups ever achieve decacorn status, so $12 billion is nothing to sneeze at. It’s a valuable enough company to have landed its founder and CEO Guillaume Pousaz on Forbes’ billionaire list.

On the other, there was a short period of time when Checkout.com was valued at a whopping $40 billion, as part of its $1 billion Series D round closed in 2022. By the end of that year, with the…