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Stripe Wants To Buy Everything
00:20:05
Stripe was in talks to buy OpenRouter for as much as $10B while still chasing PayPal. Midjourney bought astrology app Co-Star, Meta launched Facebook Verified and a standalone Seller app, and Nvidia and Microsoft defended open-weight AI.
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This episode is brought to you by Accenture. When your advertising operations fall out of sync, everything else follows. Spotify and Accenture are working together to reinvent the rhythm of ad sales using automation, analytics and smarter workflows to simplify campaign delivery and access better data across the business. The result? Less time spent on operations, more time connecting brands with the moments and fandoms that matter most. Learn more@accenture.com Spotify.
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Welcome to the tech we write home for Friday, July 24, 2026 I'm Brad McCullough. Today Stripe is in talks to buy OpenRouter for as much as $10 billion while still chasing PayPal Midjourney bought Astrology app Costar Meta, launched Facebook Verified and a standalone seller app and Nvidia and Microsoft defended Open Wait AI. Oh, and the weekend long Read Suggestions here's what you missed today in the world of
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foreign.
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Shareholders meet to discuss important matters about the companies you invest in. Now you can make your voice heard, too. Vanguard Investor Choice makes it easy to set your proxy voting preference for your eligible Vanguard index funds. Whether you hold a Vanguard fund directly or through another brokerage firm, all it takes is a few clicks to select your proxy voting preference and be heard on important shareholder topics like executive pay and Director elections. Visit vanguard.com investor choice to learn more. It's your shares. It's your voice. It's easy. Vanguard investors own shares of their index funds, and those funds own shares of the companies they invest in. Vanguard Marketing Corporation Distributor Some interesting acquisitions or potential moves to tell you about? Sources tell the Journal that Stripe is in talks to acquire Open Router, which helps developers use various AI models. Even they say OpenRouter could fetch around $10 billion, which is interesting because according to PitchBook, OpenRouter was valued at $1.3 billion back in May. I guess the moving to cheaper models thing is a big deal right now. OpenRouter is part of an emerging crop of startups that have a lucrative niche between AI developers and the companies that want to use them. Founded in 2023, the company sells software that allows customers to easily access AI models built by OpenAI and Anthropic, as well as Open Weight that are free for anyone to download and run. The company lists hundreds of large language models on its platform, allowing developers and businesses to easily access, compare and switch between them. A deal for OpenRouter could allow stripe to seize upon a hot area of growth in the AI market. Many tech companies are looking to use a wide range of different AI models as a way to control spending and diversify away from OpenAI and Anthropic. Stripe is primarily a payments processor, helping companies across the Internet accept payments, but it has recently tried to expand into new areas, such as infrastructure for AI and stablecoin payments. Its valuation hit $159 billion earlier this year. OpenRouter and Stripe also already have a partnership together, where OpenRouter uses Stripe to accept payments from its customers, among other things. OpenRouter was most recently valued at $1.3 billion back in May, according to PitchBook. Its backers include Menlo Ventures and Capital G, the growth venture fund of Google parent company Alphabet. The information reported earlier that OpenRouter was fielding takeover interest. Stripe has separately been pursuing a deal for PayPal alongside private equity firm Adv. The duo recently made an unsolicited offer that would value PayPal at roughly $53 billion. Yeah, did we talk about that? I actually legitimately cannot remember quoting Reuters. The offer submitted earlier this month is backed by about $50 billion in committed financing from banks, said one of the people involved in the deal. The offer represents around a 28% premium to PayPal's closing price recently. Combining Stripe and PayPal, the most widely used payment platform for Internet merchants, would create one of the world's largest global online payments companies, processing some $3.7 trillion of annual payment volume. The proposal follows an initial approach made in early April, the source said. Stripe and Advent have not received a response from PayPal and are seeking to advance discussions in the coming weeks, the sources said. Under the proposal, Stripe and Advent would jointly own PayPal, with each holding an equity stake rather than breaking up the company, the people said, adding that there is no certainty the approach will result in a transaction, And Midjourney continues to be an odd one. Last we heard from them, they had unveiled an ultrasound based full body scanner. Now they've bought an astrology app, quoting Bloomberg Artificial intelligence Lab Midjourney has bought the popular astrology app Costar and is building its first standalone image generation app, the startup's latest move to push into new business areas after promising an ambitious expansion last costar uses birth charts and a combination of AI and human writing to offer personalized advice and assess compatibility between the user and any friends, they add. The free app, which offers some paid features, has about 4.3 million monthly active users, according to Sensor Tower Data. The previously unreported acquisition closed this spring, Midjourney said. It declined to disclose financial terms. Midjourney, best known for offering a generative AI subscription service that lets customers create images and video clips surprised the industry last month by announcing it's working on a full body ultrasound machine that will eventually be installed in spa locations. That device is one of eight projects the San Francisco based startup is currently focused on, split between four hardware and four software initiatives, it said at the time. The CoStar acquisition is just one part of the company's plan to reimagine itself, tying together Midjourney's increasingly eclectic range of projects. Is this humanistic theme across everything, founder and Chief Executive Officer David Holtz said in an interview. Holtz said the company is planning to introduce an image creation app based on the generative AI technology it's best known for, before expanding into other uses like storytelling with images and video or creating virtual worlds. The research lab is also working on a new AI video model, he said. Something that we're talking a lot about is as we build more advanced video models, what is a really fun and nice way to actually make stories, holt said of the Future Tools. While OpenAI's now defunct Sora app tried to make video generation more accessible by letting users create TikTok style clips with a single text prompt, it's not really storytelling per se, he added. Midjourney may be trying to learn from the social aspect of CoStar's compatibility reports and include features such as letting users create images with others or find people with similar creative pursuits, according to both Holtz and Guller. There's always been a lot of opportunity for doing stuff like this, but we never really had a team to do it before, Holt said. CoStar, which has been profitable, may expand into the online dating space, Guller said without providing more details. The app currently shows compatibility metrics for users only if they have manually added each other as friends. It is not designed to match strangers based on how compatible they are, despite that being a popular user request, Goller said. End quote. And why is Proof of Life a big deal all of a sudden? I probably know the answer right following this week's Google News, quoting Engadget in the face of AI content, profiles and slop, Meta hopes a new Facebook Verified program will help human users interact with other humans based on a facial recognition selfie checked against your existing profile pics. The company says the process will only take a few minutes. It's interesting that Meta has chosen to use facial recognition, given recent legal settlements and the pushback over facial recognition inside its smart glasses. To qualify, you will have to be over 18 and in good standing with Facebook's community standards. Once you pass the test, your Verified badge will appear across Marketplace, dating and other parts of Facebook sites and services. The big difference between this and the Facebook badge of old is that it's explicitly only identity confirmation, not endorsement from Facebook or any guarantee of their trustworthiness. Unlike metaverified, it's entirely free. The feature comes as a wave of scammers and bad actors are using generative AI tools to create and use fake profiles with realistic profile images, photos and backstories capable of sending automated messages at scale. It's an attempt by Meta to protect its users to some extent from fraud and scams. It's part of several Facebook announcements made this morning, including a new push into immersive video, aka more TikTok. Chasing it teased a reimagined experience that will test full screen videos for a section of users the moment they open the app, perhaps learning lessons from aggressive changes to the base Facebook experience in the past, Meta says users will have the option to opt out and go back to a typical Feed first interface if they want. The feature won't be available for Pages or Promote accounts and will be gradually rolled out across Facebook from Monday, starting in select markets with plans to expand globally. When critical company knowledge isn't documented, there's a major ripple effect. Work becomes inconsistent, tools don't get adopted, and knowledge walks out the door when someone leaves. Thankfully, our sponsor, Scribe, was built to fix that. Their Workflow AI platform is trusted by nearly half of the Fortune 500 to capture workflows in real time. Here's how it works. You turn on the Scribe browser extension or desktop app, do a process as you normally would, and Scribe will build a guide as you go. It automatically redacts sensitive information and even suggests improvements to your existing workflows. To see what Scribe could look like for your org, head to Scribe how ridehome and mention Ride Home for your first month of Scribe capture free on select plans. That's S C R I B E How ridehome Also, Meta has launched Seller, a free standalone app version of Facebook Marketplace. Seller includes AI features that scan photos to fill out listings automatically. I need to get on this this weekend I've got a used kid's bicycle I need to sell. Quoting the Times 10 years ago when Meta noticed that millions of Facebook users were buying and selling items on its platform, it spun up a part of the app called Facebook Marketplace for them to do just that. Since then, Marketplace has become one of the most popular parts of Facebook, where people for what is essentially the Internet's largest garage sale of clothes, furniture and used cars. On Friday Meta capitalized on that popularity with the launch of Seller, a standalone app for Marketplace sellers. The move was part of Meta's strategy to innovate on its original social network. In May, the Silicon Valley company released an app called Forum for People who Use Facebook Groups, another core part of Facebook, as it tries to nurture Facebook's most popular communities. Beyond its news feed, Facebook Marketplace has been a hit that has kept people, especially younger users, interested in Facebook. A third of the young adults who use Facebook each day also use marketplace, Mr. Allison said. Every month, more than 430 million items, including 44 million vehicles, are listed on Marketplace globally. Last year, Meta created a plan for a new slate of apps to cater to Facebook's power users, whom Mr. Allison described as the people that are making stuff happen. Beyond traditional content creators. They include sellers on Marketplace and users who run their own Facebook groups. Users can sign into Seller with their Facebook accounts, which will sync their old listings of items that are for sale. From there, people can navigate between their inbox, a dashboard with data on old listings and a tool to create new ones. Seller is free and will also be available in web browsers for users who download the app. Meta makes money from Marketplace from advertisements on the app and does not take a cut of sales. Seller also includes new AI features, like scanning photos with AI to fill out listings automatically. The goal of the AI features is to make selling items less of a hassle without replacing the human elements, Mr. Allison said, which is why many people go to Marketplace in the first place. End quote. Meta, Nvidia, Microsoft, A16Z and others have signed a letter defending open source AI. Jensen Huang, in his first X post, says open models strengthen cybersecurity, quoting Bloomberg in a letter Friday, tech firms including Palantir and Meta platforms argued that an open approach to AI software development was critical to continuing innovation in AI and other key areas of the economy. Open weight models allow users to download and customize the technology, making it more versatile to developers and businesses. Open weight models are, quote, an important part of that foundation because they make advanced AI more accessible, adaptable and widely available, read the letter, which was shared by Nvidia Chief Executive Officer Jensen Huang in his first post to a new Personal X account. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella also shared it from his account. Chinese companies, including Deepseek, have previously flooded the market with more affordable open models that typically lag behind the most cut edge software from US rivals but nonetheless can undercut them on price. While some developers like OpenAI do offer open alternatives, much of their focus has been on closed or proprietary systems that they sell to businesses and customers to recoup the substantial cost of building AI. The coalition of Tech firms did not mention China or Moonshot in the letter, but rather appealed to the need to bolster and maintain US Competitiveness in AI. Open weight models have the potential to bolster global adoption of AI, thereby driving up sales of chips from firms like Nvidia. Our AI leadership will be judged not by one frontier AI model, but by whether the United States builds a strong, open ecosystem that diffuses into every sector, the letter said. This is essential for creating opportunities for innovation and prosperity across the country. End quote. Time for the weekend long read suggestions and first up, meet all the middle aged women who don't exist. They're all gorgeous, apparently. They're all 57 years old and they're all selling you NMN AI generated wellness influencers are targeting women over 40 all the time now. Quoting Charlotte's book, Jennifer again is created to look exactly like the dream but not possible goal of a 50 something woman. She is fit and toned, chiseled but natural. She looks her age, but her skin is perfect and her cheekbones and jawline are impossibly tight. These women all use similar language and poses. No ice baths, no crazy detoxes. SPF 10,000 steps and all it takes is these magic supplements. Duh. Silly middle aged women. I can't believe I spent all that money and got a facelift or did a silly thing like detoxing and juice cleanses to help slim down. I just should have taken an NMN supplement and a probiotic. It's that simple. I have to admit that I was fooled by these videos. I couldn't tell they were AI until a fitness influencer that I followed called one of them out. And once I saw it, I could not not unsee it. Now I see them everywhere. Tons of Amazon AI supplement influencers. We're already swimming in manufactured reality. So is an AI woman really where we draw the line? I don't know the answer, but it upsets me. Am I the only one more upset about this? Because I genuinely believed Isabel was a real person. This isn't just aspirational marketing, it's manufactured identity. Isabel is not a woman with great genes. She is not a woman with incredible discipline. She is not a woman at all. She is a carefully engineered marketing avatar designed to trigger the exact insecurity women in their 50s are already struggling with. Then conveniently offer the solution. That's not influencer marketing. That's a grift end quote and Then from the FT apparently big US pizza delivery chains are struggling as apps such as DoorDash and Uber Eats give independent pizzerias and other restaurants greater market access. Quote Papa John's plans to close about 200 locations by December. Pizza Hut sold to private equity last month and shares in Domino's have slid about 30% in the past year. Chain pizza revenue declined over overall in 2025 after years of slowing growth, according to market research firm Technomic. Analysts say a significant reason for pizza's tumble is a long term challenge facing the delivery business. Once, pizza chain's delivery apparatus was the biggest game in town for hungry consumers who wanted hot food at their door. Now, the likes of uber eats and DoorDash mean other types of restaurants have easy access to the capability that once set Domino's and its peers apart. Delivery sales at quick service pizza chains have slipped roughly 15% since 2021, according to JP Morgan. The rise of delivery app a short term boost for some pizza companies Papa John's and Pizza Hut, which both joined the apps in the late 2010s, said that the availability of third party delivery drivers helped them mitigate pandemic era labor shortages. But analysts say third party apps have dramatically increased the competitive pressure facing pizza delivery from all sides. Pizza chains used to have a large gap relative to competitors when it came to technology, said John Tower, an analyst at Citibank. Pizza Hut, Papa John's and Domino's all launched mobile ordering apps by the early 2010s, which allowed the chains to offer a smoother ordering process than independent pizzerias and to promote deals on the app. Now local pizza stores can simply sell on Uber Eats. The competitive moat around technology that chains once had is dwindling, Tower said. End quote. No bonus content this weekend Talk to you on Monday.