News Headline: Stripe’s employee stock sale sets valuation at $65B

Wednesday, February 28, 2024

Good afternoon, and welcome to TechCrunch PM. Today's newsletter will get you updated on Stripe's spiked valuation (30% higher). We also look at how Bitcoin's rally is affecting Coinbase (badly) and Adobe getting into music (do-re-mi). There's also another update on Bumble and Mobile World Congress. In addition, we've got some car talk.

— Christine

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TechCrunch PM Top 3

Stripe's valuation jumps 30%: Stripe inked a liquidity deal with some of its investors to purchase over $1 billion of stock owned by current and former employees. The tender offer values the payments infrastructure giant at $65 billion. Not bad. The move also tells us that an anticipated IPO is not likely to happen this year.

Bitcoin demand is to Coinbase's detriment: Some Coinbase customers must have been panicking when they saw a zero balance today. The crypto trading app has assured users that their assets are safe, but the company is still trying to figure out what caused the issue. For now, we think Bitcoin is the culprit. As of late, Bitcoin's price has surged close to its all-time high in 2021. And that has people flocking to apps like Coinbase to get in on the demand.

What's old is new again for AI: Get an inside look at what diffusion transformers are and how they are a key component in OpenAI's Sora and Stability AI's Stable Diffusion 3.0.

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More top reads

Adobe is spinning music: Adobe is getting in on the generative AI–powered music editing and creation with Project Music GenAI Control, a platform that can generate audio from text descriptions or a reference melody and let users customize the results within the same workflow.

Totango and Catalyst are merging: No money is changing hands, though. Think of this merger as two customer success companies coming together to take on the market's Goliath.

Speaking of mergers: Reliance and Disney are merging their media businesses in India to create the largest media entity in the South Asian market, valued at $8.5 billion. Reliance thinks it's great. Disney, maybe not so much.

We are family, a StarCoder family: Hugging Face and ServiceNow teamed up to create StarCoder, an open source code generator with a less restrictive license than some of the others out there. Now there's StarCoder 2. However, this isn't just one code-generating model, but three.

Bumble is rethinking its vision: That's after announcing weak earnings and massive job cuts this week. Part of the plan includes pumping new life back into its Bumble BFF friend-finding business.

Guess who works at Bluesky now?: Aaron Rodericks, Twitter's former Trust and Safety team co-led, is now heading up Trust and Safety over at X rival Bluesky. You may remember Rodericks became known more publicly after becoming the target of a right-wing campaign on X.

Car talk: We learned that Motional, the autonomous vehicle joint venture between Hyundai Motor Group and Aptiv, told employees it will cut about 5% of its workforce. It's not a lot of its employees, but considering it made a 10% layoff in late 2022, it adds up. Meanwhile, Polestar secured a $950 million loan in what was described as "critical funds" needed to keep its electric vehicle plans moving forward after Volvo decided to pull back its financial support of the electric automaker.

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Before you go

Mobile World Congress 2024 is wrapping up tomorrow. For an overview of the most important tech revealed at Mobile World Congress, head here. Today we learned that you can make thread from kombucha. And if we ever want a workout buddy, Liveliness has an app for that.

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On the pods

In today's Equity — the podcast about the business of startups, where we unpack the numbers and nuance behind the headlines — Alex Wilhelm focused on startup and venture capital news.

He went through Microsoft's investment in Mistral AI (sure, it's not the biggest check, but as regulators hover over Microsoft's shoulder, the deal makes sense); what the heck happened for Thrasio to file for bankruptcy; Glean's $200 million raise (it turns out that you can indeed raise mega-rounds in 2024. You just need to work in enterprise AI, have a few hundred customers and collect checks from a host of VCs at once); and a few new venture funds. Listen here.