After a federal court issued a scathing order Wednesday night that found Apple in "willful violation" of an injunction meant to allow iOS apps to provide alternate payment options, app developers are capitalizing on the moment. Spotify may be the quickest of them all.

Less than 24 hours after District Court Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers found that Apple had sought to thwart a 2021 injunction and engaged in an "obvious cover-up" around its actions, Spotify announced in a blog post that it had submitted an updated app to Apple. The updated app can show specific plan prices, link out to Spotify's website for plan changes and purchases that avoid Apple's 30 percent commission on in-app purchases, and display promotional offers, all of which were disallowed under Apple's prior App Store rules.

Spotify's post adds that Apple's newly court-enforced policy "opens the door to other seamless buying opportunities that will directly benefit creators (think easy-to-purchase audiobooks)." Spotify posted on X (formerly Twitter) Friday morning that the updated app was approved by Apple. Apple made substantial modifications to its App Review Guidelines on Friday and emailed registered developers regarding the changes.

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• Imagine making an extra $8 billion and not really caring about it.
• That's Google, right now: The company says the value of one of its investments increased by $8 billion this quarter, but won't say which one.
• I have some ideas.

Most companies would make a big deal if they found an extra $8 billion in their couch cushions.

Google is not one of those companies.

Tucked away at the bottom of Google's earnings' release Thursday is this note bit of accountantspeak: "OI&E of $11.2 billion for the three months ended March 31, 2025 included an $8.0 billion unrealized gain on our non-marketable equity securities related to our investment in a private company."

Translated: We invest in private companies and one of them is worth a lot more now than it was before, so we're noting that here.

On the one hand: Even for Google, adding an extra $8 billion of paper profit matters. It helped push the company's net income to $35.5 billion in the last quarter, up from $23.7 billion a year earlier.

On the other hand: No one seems to care. At least on Wall Street, anyway. I just listened to Google's earnings call and there wasn't a single question about the $8 billion. No one seemed remotely interested to know which of Google's investments had just zoomed up.

That makes some sense. If you're in the business of analyzing Google, you want to know what's happening to its core business — selling ads. The fact that an unrelated business it took a flyer on is worth much more doesn't really figure into your analysis.

Also, the analysts likely figured that Google wouldn't say anything if they asked, anyway. Which is what happened when I asked Google comms to shed some light on that gain — specifically, which company they were talking about.

But I care! So I did some quick looking around and came up with four likely suspects that Google has invested in and which have gained value:

Anthropic. Google owns a reported 14% stake in the OpenAI rival. And Anthropic's value, like other AI platforms, has been rocketing recently. At the end of last year, a funding round valued the company at $41 billion, per Yahoo's private company tracking service. But a new round valued the company at $61.5 billion in March 2025.

SpaceX: Google invested in Elon Musk's rocket company — making a $1 billion investment, along with Fidelity, in 2015. A funding round in late last year valued SpaceX at $350 billion. Its valuation the year prior was $175 billion.

Databricks: This is one of those companies that no one outside of Silicon Valley knows about, but people in tech are definitely tracking, because the analytics platform also has a crazy funding trajectory. At the end of 2024, a $10 billion funding round valued the company at $62 billion, up from $43 billion in the fall of 2023.

Stripe: This one's a bit of a wild card. The online payments company has been enormously valuable for a long time, and is a perennial IPO candidate. But Stripe also doesn't seem that interested in going public anytime soon. Its valuation isn't driven by funding rounds, but by secondary sales that let existing investors and employees cash out. The value of those deals is up and to the right, too, though: The most recent ones reportedly peg Stripe's value at $91.5 billion, up from $50 billion a couple of years ago.

• Patrick Collison said Stripe invites a customer to leadership meetings every two weeks.
• The fintech CEO says it sparks new ideas — even with other feedback systems in place.
• Elon Musk gave the move his seal of approval on X, calling it a "good idea."

Stripe CEO Patrick Collison has a direct way to get customer feedback: invite them to management meetings.

Collison shared a post on X this week that Stripe invites one customer to join the first 30 minutes of its leadership meetings every other week, which are attended by around 40 of the company's top managers.

The guest then shares "candid" feedback about their experience with the payments platform.

The move may be unusual, but it received some support, including from Elon Musk, who replied on X the next day, "Good idea."

Collison said the practice consistently generates "new thoughts and investigations" despite Stripe already having plenty of other feedback channels.

Stripe, founded in 2010 by brothers Patrick and John Collison, provides software tools for online and in-person payment processing to millions of businesses globally.

Originally built as a payments platform for startups, it's now used by half of the Fortune 100 and processed $1.4 trillion in payments in 2024, a 38% increase from the previous year, the company said in its most recent annual letter.

Following a secondary share sale in early 2025, the company was valued at $91.5 billion, making it one of the world's most valuable private fintech companies.

However, as Stripe has scaled, it has faced criticism from some users who think the company's focus has shifted toward large enterprise clients.

"Hi Patrick — you know I admire Stripe — but you should pay attention to the extent things have degraded for the indie community using Stripe," Pascal Levy-Garboua, an investor and cofounder, commented on the post. "I messaged support a week ago - no reply, things are super complicated. There's more stuff, but it's a mess."

Others praised the customer-in-the-room tactic as a way to maintain customer empathy. "Love this," one user replied. "Keeps the culture focused on what matters."

When Cloudflare's chief technology officer, Dane Knecht, asked when they'd get an invite, Collison replied, "Would love to have you guys… will reach out." Shopify's head of engineering, Farhan Thawar, also weighed in, calling it a "great idea" and adding, "Lmk when you'd like @Shopify to attend."

Stripe laid off 300 employees in January — about 3.5% of its workforce — Business Insider previously reported.

Despite the cuts, the company's chief people officer, Rob McIntosh said it still planned to grow headcount to around 10,000 by the end of the year.

In its annual letter released Thursday, payments giant Stripe declared that it was “seeing an AI boom” with its data, revealing that artificial intelligence startups are growing more rapidly than traditional SaaS companies have historically. In a chart, Stripe showed that the top 100 AI companies (by revenue) were able to achieve $5 million in […]

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Digital payments platform Stripe has yet to lay out plans to go public, but in the meantime the company has thrown past and present employees a line for some liquidity. The company on Thursday confirmed a tender offer where investors will buy up shares from those employees at a valuation of $91.5 billion. Stripe said […]

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Stripe is in talks for another shareholder sale that could value the company at “at least” $85 billion, according to multiple reports and a source familiar with the matter. The Information first reported the news that the payments infrastructure giant is working to sell employee-owned stocks. The move would help workers gain some liquidity as […]

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Stripe has closed on its $1.1 billion purchase of stablecoin platform Bridge — marking the payment giant’s largest acquisition to date and tangible push into crypto. Co-founded in 2022 by Coinbase and Square alumni Zach Abrams and Sean Yu, San Antonio, Texas-based Bridge built an API that helps companies accept stablecoins. The pair raised $58 […]

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Asya Bradley, a former fintech founder and investor, has joined payments giant Stripe as its new head of Startup & Venture Capital Partnerships. Bradley announced the news on February 2 in a post on LinkedIn, though her bio shows that she joined Stripe back in November. Neither Stripe nor Bradley were immediately available for comment.  […]

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Welcome to TechCrunch Fintech!  This week we’re looking at the story behind the sale of Divvy Homes, Ramp’s new product, some notable fundraising deals, and more! To get a roundup of TechCrunch’s biggest and most important fintech stories delivered to your inbox every Tuesday at 8:00 a.m. PT, subscribe here. The big story Last week, […]

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• DeepSeek's AI models have taken the tech industry by storm in recent days.
• More than 20 big AWS customers have asked Amazon for access to DeepSeek models: internal document.
• AWS's strategy focuses on offering diverse AI models, unlike competitors that prioritize their own.

Big Amazon cloud customers have been pressing the tech giant to give them access to DeepSeek's AI models, the latest sign of the Chinese startup taking the tech world by storm.

More than 20 key clients of Amazon Web Services asked the company to make DeepSeek models available through Amazon's Bedrock AI development tool this weekend, according to an internal document obtained by Business Insider.

Toyota, Stripe, Cisco, Yelp, and Workday were among AWS customers asking for this access, with many wanting to test and evaluate DeepSeek's AI capabilities internally. Other companies that made similar requests include Mercado Libre and Kellogg, the document showed.

An Amazon spokesperson told BI that Bedrock customers use multiple models to meet their unique needs and the company remains focused on "providing our customers with choice."

"We are always listening to customers to bring the latest emerging and popular models to AWS," the spokesperson said.

Spokespeople for Stripe, Cisco, Yelp, Workday, Toyota, Mercado Libre, and Kellogg didn't respond to requests for comment.

DeepSeek recently rolled out AI models that are on par with, or better than, some of Silicon Valley's top offerings — at a fraction of the cost. Its cheap pricing, strong performance, and compute-efficiency have raised questions about US tech companies' massive spending on competing products.

Tech stocks, including Nvidia, Broadcom, and TSMC, plunged on Monday as investors tried to assess the long-term implications of DeepSeek's initial success.

Amazon shares dropped early on Monday trading, but rallied during the day to end up 0.2%.

The moves highlight Amazon's strategic advantage in the generative AI race. From early on, AWS focused on providing customers with as many AI models as possible through Bedrock, believing that no one model would dominate the market.

That's a contrast to other tech companies, such as OpenAI and Google, which have spent heavily on building their own frontier AI models.

AWS still has an internal AGI team developing its own AI models, and the company unveiled the latest version, Nova, in December. However, Amazon has mostly prioritized offering a range of other AI models through the cloud.

Amazon often makes decisions based on customer feedback, and the company is likely considering making DeepSeek's models available through Bedrock after such a flood of client requests, according to a person familiar with the matter.

One AWS employee told BI that the company is not in "panic" mode over DeepSeek like some other tech companies. If DeepSeek's models are good, "we'll just host it on Bedrock," this person said. They asked not to be identified discussing private matters.

"We expect to see many more models like this — both large and small, proprietary and open-source — excel at different tasks," the Amazon spokesperson told BI, while noting that customers can access some DeepSeek-related products on AWS through tools such as Bedrock.

Do you work at Amazon? Got a tip?

Contact the reporter Eugene Kim via the encrypted-messaging apps Signal or Telegram (+1-650-942-3061) or email ([email protected]). Reach out using a nonwork device. Check out Insider's source guide for other tips on sharing information securely.

• Stripe accidentally sent an image of a cartoon duck to some staff in a layoff email, BI has learned.
• The company also sent some laid-off employees an incorrect termination date.
• Stripe laid off 300 people on Monday, mostly product, engineering, and operations workers.

The payments-software company Stripe accidentally emailed an image of a cartoon duck to some employees when notifying them that they had been laid off, Business Insider has learned.

The company laid off 300 employees on Monday, equivalent to about 3.5% of its workforce. Those roles were primarily in product, engineering, and operations, according to a leaked memo obtained by BI.

The image, which was attached as a PDF, showed a yellow duck with brown feathers on its wing and accompanying text that said, "US-Non-California Duck."

The company also sent impacted staff an incorrect termination date in an email.

A Stripe spokesperson confirmed the duck image and incorrect dates were sent in error and pointed BI to a follow-up email from McIntosh.

"I also want to note that some impacted Stripes received a notification error to their personal email accounts Monday evening PT," McIntosh wrote.

"I apologize for the error and any confusion it caused," he added. "Corrected and full notifications have since been sent to all impacted Stripes."

In a separate email to staff confirming the layoffs, McIntosh said Stripe still planned on growing its head count to about 10,000 employees by the end of the year.

In an internal Stripe group on the Blind app for professional communities seen by BI, one employee asked whether others had received the duck image.

One person responded that they had and that it was another "indication the comms to those laid off were flubbed completely."

Another employee, seemingly joking, wrote, "Wonder if there's a california duck." A different employee wrote, "Quick, make a slack emoji out of the duck."

Stripe, which provides payment software to millions of businesses, has had other rounds of layoffs in recent years.

A publicly shared letter from Stripe CEO Patrick Collison explaining more than 1,000 job cuts in 2022 won praise from some corners for its candidness.

Are you a Stripe employee with insight to share? Contact the reporter Jyoti Mann via email at [email protected] or via Signal at jyotimann.11. Reach out via a nonwork device.

Fintech giant Stripe is laying off 300 people, according to a leaked memo reported on Tuesday by Business Insider. The affected employees are “largely in product, engineering, and operations roles,” the memo said. Despite the layoffs, Chief People Officer Rob McIntosh said that Stripe intends to still grow its headcount by 17% “to land at […]

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• Stripe has laid off 300 employees, according to an internal memo obtained by Business Insider.
• The cuts mostly affected staffers in product, engineering, and operations roles, per the memo.
• Its chief people officer said in the memo the company still planned to grow its head count.

The payments platform Stripe has laid off 300 employees, equivalent to about 3.5% of its workforce, Business Insider has learned.

The company's chief people officer, Rob McIntosh, informed staff of the cuts in an email on Monday, obtained by BI.

McIntosh said that 300 employees — primarily in product, engineering, and operations — would be affected by the cuts but that Stripe still planned on growing its head count to about 10,000 employees by the end of the year.

Stripe confirmed the layoffs to BI.

The Irish American multinational, which has dual headquarters in San Francisco and Dublin, laid off more than 1,000 employees in 2022 — equivalent to about 14% of its workforce at the time.

In mid-2023, Stripe cut a few dozen roles, mostly from its recruiting department, The Information reported at the time.

BI understands that Stripe had 8,500 employees before the latest rounds of layoffs.

Founded in 2010 by the brothers John and Patrick Collison, Stripe provides software tools for online and in-person payment processing to millions of businesses.

Read the full memo below:

Hi all,

As we've been working through our plans for 2025, leaders took a close look at their organizations and team structures. It became clear that there were several team-level changes needed to make sure we have the right people in the right roles and locations to execute against our plans.

It's not easy to make all these changes at once, but it's even harder to have them roll out gradually throughout the year, and so we asked leaders to do all they could to pull these decisions forward. As a result, about 300 Stripes, largely in product, engineering, and operations roles, are departing today.[0] All those who are impacted have already been informed, and everyone will receive a severance package, including their earned annual bonus.

I want to be clear that we're not slowing down hiring — we expect to grow headcount across all our locations and to land at about 10,000 Stripes by the end of the year (a 17% Y/Y increase). Our business performance continues to be strong.

Our confidence that this is the right business decision doesn't make it easier for those who are leaving or those losing valued teammates. I appreciate everyone's resilience and want to thank those departing for their contributions and for building with us.

Rob

[0] There are local processes commencing for some Stripes outside the US, in accordance with country-specific employment practices.

Are you a Stripe employee with insight to share? Contact the reporter Jyoti Mann via email at [email protected] or via Signal at jyotimann.11. Reach out via a nonwork device.

• Anthropic is reportedly nearing a $60 billion valuation.
• The Amazon-backed AI company is one of the most valuable unlisted companies in the US.
• Here are the top five US unicorns.

Anthropic is reportedly closing in on a deal that would value it at $60 billion as investors pile into AI companies.

The AI startup is backed by Amazon, and its latest funding round would propel it into the top five most valuable unlisted startups in the US — three of which are AI companies, according to data from CB Insights as of January 7.

The power and popularity of generative AI has led to Big Tech and startups using billions to fund their AI projects. As December came to a close, UBS said Big Tech was on pace to have spent $222 billion on building AI in 2024.

Apple, which was notably late to join the AI craze, has partnered with OpenAI to bring ChatGPT to Apple Intelligence on new iPhone models, a move that may have helped boost OpenAI's valuation.

Anthropic's round of funding was led by venture firm Lightspeed Venture Partners, according to The Wall Street Journal. The $60 billion figure includes the money it plans to raise this round.

Here are the top five most valuable unlisted companies.

SpaceX: $350 billion

SpaceX is one of two startups in the top five that aren't primarily AI companies. The designer, maker, and launcher of rockets and spacecraft was founded by billionaire Elon Musk in 2002, using a $100 million investment from the sale of PayPal.

The startup employs about 12,000 staff, with 200 rocket launches under its belt. One of Musk's missions is to colonize Mars by 2050 with reusable rockets.

A deal worth $1.25 billion made SpaceX the most valuable private startup, with a valuation of $350 billion, Bloomberg reported in December.

OpenAI: $157 billion

OpenAI was founded in 2015 by its current CEO, Sam Altman, and Musk. The release of AI chatbot ChatGPT in 2022 took the tech industry by storm. The startup almost doubled its valuation from $86 billion to $157 billion after a fundraising round in October, according to the Journal.

Since ChatGPT's release, the AI assistant garnered over 200 million weekly users, OpenAI said in August.

Stripe: $70 billion

The other non-AI startup in the top five is Stripe, a payment software company founded in 2009 by brothers Patrick and John Collison.

Although Stripe isn't classified as an AI company, its CFO joined the board of AI startup Vercel in December. Stripe began buying back some of its shares in November at a $70 billion valuation, according to Bloomberg.

Databricks: $62 billion

Databricks, a cloud-based data and AI company, announced a $10 billion funding round in December that would bring its valuation to $62 billion. It launched its AI model, DBRX, in March 2024.

"Generative AI is going to disrupt any software company that exists today," Ali Ghodsi, CEO of Databricks, previously said to Business Insider.

He added, "These models are going to change how humans interact with machines and how machines interact with humans."

Anthropic: $60 billion

In 2021, ex-OpenAI employees founded Anthropic. The startup has since started competing with the ChatGPT maker with its own chatbot, Claude. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei was the vice president of research at OpenAI before leaving in 2020, according to his LinkedIn profile.

While ChatGPT has captured the attention of casual users who want to make a meal plan or get essay help, Anthropic's AI has been attracting developers when it comes to coding. CB Insights previously valued it at just over $16 billion.

• 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.