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Stripe acquires Privy, Cursor's $900M Series C, and Databricks launches Lakebase
- Authors
- Name
- Hashim Warren
- @hashim_warren
Launch of the Week
Databricks, the data lakehouse, launched a new database product, Lakebase in public preview. Lakebase is a Postgres database built specifically for AI applications.
Lakebase is unique because developers can use it for operational data and analytical workloads. Suddenly the massive Neon acquisition makes sense. Lakebase is built on Neon and has the branching and “serverless” features that made Neon popular.
Databricks is hoping Lakebase will reach product-market fit for AI applications. I’m watching this space closely.
Enterprise Watch 🏆
Plaid, the fintech infrastructure platform, gets the trophy this week for launching Plaid Protect, their anti-fraud solution. What’s interesting about Plaid Protect is its risk model is based on data from users’ bank accounts. This is likely a better signal than what Stripe or Paypal/Braintree has, which bases fraud prevention on anomalies in their own network.
Plaid Protect is one of several features Plaid launched last week as it marches to become a more comprehensive fintech platform.
Funding and Acquisitions
Stripe, the payments platform, acquired Privy, the crypto wallet infrastructure company. Wait - crypto is still a thing?
Stripe thinks so, and they are betting that digital assets and traditional payments will converge. I’m skeptical that crypto will ever be used on a mass scale for payments, and I think it will remain just a value store for investors.
Cursor, the AI code editor, announced a massive $900 million Series C at a $9.9 billion valuation. Yes, this is the second time I’ve used “massive” in this issue, but there’s no other way I can describe this fundraise.
Is Cursor overvalued? The team says they’ve reached over $500 million in ARR and have adoption by half the Fortune 500. We don’t know their burn rate, but it looks like they have a real business.
GTM trends
Typesense, the alternative to Algolia, sponsors Selenium, the open source browser automation framework. Warp, the AI-powered terminal, sponsors Win11Debloat, a popular Powershell script.
Sponsoring open source projects won’t help you reach your growth goals on its own, but it could be a low cost, high value branding activity. The key is not relying on direct traffic or even awareness from the OSS project. The sponsorship should be something you talk about on social media, or somewhere on your own site.
More Developer Tool News
✨ Knock, the notification platform, added scheduling and analytics for product guides. I was looking forward to this roadmap item when I worked at Knock, so kudos to my former colleagues for shipping an impactful feature.
✨ Strapi, the headless CMS, launched Strapi AI for content generation. Every CMS is adding AI features that enable content creation, but Strapi has a developer-first approach. Strapi AI is focused on producing content types. I love it when AI features are actually useful and a little circumspect.
✨ Warp, the alternative terminal, launched a ton of new AI features, including the ability to add MCP servers. What’s smart about this launch is Warp has been on social media demonstrating how popular tools like Slack and Prisma Postgres can be controlled on the terminal via their MCP servers.