OpenAI is bringing o1, its “reasoning” AI model, to its API — but only for certain developers, to start. Starting Tuesday, o1 will begin rolling out to devs in OpenAI’s “tier 5” usage category, the company said. To qualify for tier 5, developers have to spend at least $1,000 with OpenAI and have an account […]
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Vercel
Vercel, an AI startup valued at more than $3 billion, just bulked up its board with the addition of a finance executive who has experience taking tech companies public.
Stripe Chief Financial Officer Steffan Tomlinson will serve as a director on Vercel's board, the startup said on Tuesday.
Tomlinson was previously CFO at several other tech startups, guiding Palo Alto Networks, Confluent, and Aruba Networks through the IPO process.
Stripe, one of the world's most valuable startups, has long been mentioned as an IPO candidate. Vercel is earlier in its lifecycle, however the AI startup has been putting some of the early pieces in place to potentially go public someday.
"Steffan's experience leading developer-focused companies from startup to public markets makes him an ideal addition to Vercel's Board of Directors as we continue to put our products in the hands of every developer," Vercel CEO and founder Guillermo Rauch said.
Vercel
Last year, Vercel tapped Marten Abrahamsen as its CFO. He's been building out Vercel's finance, legal, and corporate development teams and systems while leading the startup through a $250 million funding round at a $3.25 billion valuation in May.
"Steffan's financial expertise and leadership experience come at a pivotal moment for Vercel as we scale our enterprise presence and build on our momentum," Abrahamsen said.
The generative AI boom has recently powered Vercel's growth. The startup offers AI tools to developers, and earlier this year it surpassed $100 million in annualized revenue.
Vercel's AI SDK, a software toolkit that helps developers build AI applications, was downloaded more than 700,000 times last week, up from about 80,000 downloads a year ago, according to NPM data.
The company's Next.js open-source framework was downloaded 7.9 million times last week, compared to roughly 4.6 million downloads a year earlier, NPM data also shows.
Abrahamsen said they are building a company to one day go public, but stressed that there's no timeline or date set for such a move.
At Stripe and Confluent, Tomlinson gained experience with software that helps developers build cloud and web-based applications — and how these offerings generate revenue.
"Steffan's track record with consumption-based software business models makes him the ideal partner to inform strategic decisions," Rauch said.
Vercel is among a crop of newer developer-focused tech companies that charge based on usage. For instance, as traffic and uptime increase for developers, Vercel generates more revenue, so it's aligned with customers, Abrahamsen told Business Insider.
Similarly, Stripe collects a small fee every time someone makes a payment in an app. Confluent has a consumption-based business model, too.
This is different from traditional software-as-a-service providers, which often charge based on the number of users, or seats. For instance, Microsoft 365 costs a certain amount per month, per user.
Tomlinson also has experience working with developer-focused companies with technical founders, such as the Collison brothers who started Stripe.
Devs expect tech vendors to supply software development kits, or SDKs, alongside their products to make it easier to create apps using those products. But many vendors only offer APIs, which are simply protocols that enable software components to communicate with each other. Alex Rattray, the founder of Stainless, thinks AI can assist, here. Stainless […]
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Several factors indicate that Snyk, most recently valued at $7.4 billion, could IPO soon. But the CEO told us why it might not.
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A change to Meta’s developer tools is impacting third-party consumer apps that had previously integrated with Instagram. Among those affected by the changes are the Match-owned dating apps Tinder and Hinge, which had allowed their users to link their Instagram profiles to their accounts to display their posts to potential matches. Day One, the journaling […]
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If you're looking for a deal in the homebuying market, you might want to ditch the fixer-upper and spring for a brand-new home.
For the last half-century, newly-built homes in the US have sold for much more, on average, than older homes. But these days, new homes for sale are less expensive per square foot than existing homes. Overall, newly constructed homes are selling for just 3% more than older homes, down from an average of 16% more since 1968, The Wall Street Journal reported.
Prices for existing homes have risen as fewer of them are on the market. The inventory of existing homes being resold has fallen significantly in recent years. As of March 2024, the number of existing homes for sale had fallen to 1.1 million from 1.7 million in 2019, and sales of existing homes hit a near 30-year low last year, a Harvard report found earlier this year.
High mortgage rates could be exacerbating that shortage of existing homes, as many homeowners are putting off a move and waiting for the cost of a home loan and home prices to come down.
But this trend might be turning around. Sales of existing homes are on the rise in the Midwest, South, and West, the National Association of Realtors recently reported. "The worst of the downturn in home sales could be over, with increasing inventory leading to more transactions," NAR chief economist Lawrence Yun said in a statement.
As rates fell slightly this year, more homeowners put their homes up for sale and new home construction rose. The US is on track to build a record number of new multifamily units this year — about 500,000 Still, there's a long way to go to make up for the overall shortage in housing, which Freddie Mac recently reported was 3.7 million homes.
There are a slew of other factors at play, as well. The costs of building materials and construction labor are elevated, which makes repairing or renovating older homes much more expensive. And it doesn't help that US homes are older than ever. The median age of owner-occupied homes in the US has risen to 40 from 32 when the housing market collapsed in 2008.
New homes are getting smaller, too. The typical new build for sale in the first quarter of 2024 was 2,140 square feet, down from 2,256 square feet a year prior, according to Census data. Newly built homes peaked in size in 2015 at 2,689 and have been shrinking quite steadily since then. The share of newly constructed single-family homes with four bedrooms fell to 33% last year, the lowest level since 2012, the National Association of Homebuilders found. Meanwhile, the share of new single-family homes with two bedrooms or fewer grew to its highest level in that same period.
Did you choose between a new and an older home when purchasing? Share your story with this reporter at [email protected].
On Monday, Apple’s list of finalists for its coveted “iPhone App of the Year” award once again reveals how the iPhone maker is downplaying the impact of AI technology on the mobile app ecosystem. As it did last year, Apple’s 2024 list of top iPhone finalists favors more traditional iOS apps, including those that help […]
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TV Time, a popular TV and movie tracking and recommendations app with more than 30 million registered users, disappeared from Apple’s App Store for several weeks, leading to questions about its future from the app’s avid fan base. Considering that 2.5 million users use the app every month to track what they’re watching and to […]
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