So far in life, I haven’t needed be a “mesh guy.” A well-chosen and carefully placed Wi-Fi router has worked fine in our modest abodes, but one particular situation has resisted simple solutions until Eero put out a device in November seemingly made exactly for the purpose. This won’t be a thorough examination of the […]

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Social network Bluesky has released a new update to its app that includes a separate mentions tab in notifications, protections against username squatting, and new controls for replies sorting. The company announced that it is adding a new mentions tab with the v1.96 rollout to let you see those posts separately. Until now, all notifications […]

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• Vercel said it added Steffan Tomlinson to its board.
• Tomlinson is the CFO of Stripe and has experience taking tech startups public.
• He used to be CFO at several other tech companies, including Palo Alto Networks and Confluent.

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.

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.

GenAI growth

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. 

Consumption-based business models

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. 

Liquid AI, an AI startup co-founded by robotics luminary Daniela Rus, has raised $250 million in a Series A led by AMD. Per Bloomberg, the round values Liquid AI at over $2 billion. Liquid AI aims to build general-purpose AI systems powered by a relatively new type of AI model called a liquid neural network. Liquid […]

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The fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989 was a seminal moment in 20th century history, paving the way for German reunification. Many segments, both large and small, were preserved for posterity—including portions covered in graffiti or murals. A team of Italian scientists used a combination of spectroscopic analysis and machine learning to study paint chips from wall fragments to learn more about the chemistry of the paints and pigments used, according to a new paper published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society.

There has been increased attention in recent years to preserving street art, which is vulnerable both to degradation over time as well as deliberate vandalism. For instance, in 2021, Italian chemists figured out how to use hydrogels to remove added graffiti from vandalized murals in Florence. (Over-painting by vandals is so chemically similar to the original painting underneath that it is difficult to selectively remove just the over-painting without damaging the original.) Unlike most classic masterpieces of the past, created with paints designed to last centuries, street art is more ephemeral in nature, using materials that lack such longevity.

In many cases, like the Berlin Wall, the painters didn't bother to document the specific materials they used, their application techniques, or other useful information that conservators could use to restore or conserve street art. Modern painting materials are also much more complex, and manufacturers typically do not report specific information on the composition of those materials.

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Instagram Threads, Meta’s competitor to Elon Musk’s X, is testing a way to make your replies to others’ posts less visible on the platform. The company is adding a new privacy feature that allows you to customize your profile to remove the tab that displays your replies. This leaves only the two tabs that show […]

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Meta’s X competitor Instagram Threads is gaining an improved search interface, the company announced on Monday. The app, which offers a Meta-run alternative to Elon Musk’s X, but built on top of Instagram’s social graph, is rolling out a new way to search for specific posts, allowing users to filter searches by user profiles and […]

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