Block (Square)

Liquid AI

Block (Square)

Block makes money across several business lines. Square (the seller ecosystem) charges merchants a flat percentage per transaction — 2.6% + $0.10 for in-person payments, higher for online.

Cash App takes a fee on instant deposits, Bitcoin trading, and Cash App Pay transactions. Afterpay (announced at $29 billion in 2021, though Block's share price fell so far before closing in January 2022 that the final price was closer to $14 billion) earns merchant fees on buy-now-pay-later transactions.

TIDAL is the music streaming service (acquired from Jay-Z). Block also earns Bitcoin revenue — Cash App is one of the largest Bitcoin brokers in the US, though margins on BTC trading are razor-thin.

Liquid AI

Liquid AI builds foundation models, the big general-purpose brains that power chatbots and other AI tools. The difference is efficiency.

Their models, called Liquid Foundation Models, are designed to do more with far less memory and computing power. Companies pay to use them, either through a cloud API or by running the models on their own machines.

That second option matters. A bank or a hospital often cannot send private data to someone else's server.

Liquid AI lets them keep the model in-house. The pitch to a customer is basically this.

You get strong AI without renting a mountain of expensive chips.

Block (Square)

The origin story starts with Jim McKelvey, a glass blower in St. Louis and old friend of Jack Dorsey.

In 2009, McKelvey lost a $2,000 sale on a glass faucet because he couldn't accept credit cards. The customer wanted to pay with Amex.

McKelvey couldn't process it. The sale fell through.

McKelvey called Dorsey, who had been pushed out of the Twitter CEO job the year before and was serving as its chairman, and they started brainstorming. The problem was obvious: millions of small businesses, street vendors, farmers market sellers, and independent contractors couldn't accept credit cards because merchant accounts required monthly fees, credit checks, and clunky hardware that cost hundreds of dollars.

Dorsey and McKelvey wanted to make it so anyone could accept a credit card using just their phone.

They built a tiny white card reader that plugged into a smartphone's headphone jack. The reader cost almost nothing to manufacture and Square gave it away for free.

The software was simple — swipe the card, enter the amount, the customer signs on the screen, done. Square charged a flat 2.75% per transaction with no monthly fees, no contracts, and no minimums.

The product launched in 2010 and spread through small businesses like wildfire.

Liquid AI

Liquid AI is a spinout from MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, better known as CSAIL. The core science came from Ramin Hasani, who spent his PhD studying the nervous system of a tiny worm called C.

elegans. That worm has just 302 neurons and still manages to move, hunt, and react to its world.

Hasani and his collaborators asked a simple question. What if you built an AI that worked more like those neurons and less like a giant static network?

The answer was the liquid neural network, a model whose internal wiring keeps adjusting even after training is done. The team incorporated the company in 2023.

Daniela Rus, who runs CSAIL and is one of the most respected robotics researchers alive, came on as a co-founder. So did Mathias Lechner and Alexander Amini, both longtime research partners of Hasani.

Block (Square)

Square grew by giving away the hardware. The card reader was free.

That eliminated the biggest barrier for small businesses. A food truck operator, a yoga instructor, a farmers market vendor — anyone could start accepting cards in five minutes without spending a dollar upfront.

Square made its money on the transaction fees that followed.

The simplicity was the pitch. Traditional merchant services involved contracts, monthly minimums, tiered pricing, and hidden fees that required a finance degree to understand.

Square charged one flat rate for everything. No surprises.

That transparency built enormous trust with small business owners who had been burned by traditional processors.

Cash App grew through peer-to-peer payments and a brilliant viral strategy. The app launched in 2013 as a simple way to send money to friends.

Rappers, influencers, and content creators started using their $cashtag for tips and payments. Cash App sponsored hip-hop events and partnered with musicians.

By 2024, Cash App had over 55 million monthly active users — more than most banks.

Liquid AI

The growth angle is size, or the lack of it. Most frontier models are so heavy they only run in data centers.

Liquid AI aims for models light enough to run on a phone, a car, or a factory robot. That opens doors the giants cannot easily reach.

The AMD partnership pushes the same idea. AMD makes chips, and it wants efficient models that show off its hardware.

So AMD led the Series A and became both an investor and a distribution partner. Liquid AI also releases open models to researchers, which builds a following before the sales team ever makes a call.

Block (Square)

The Afterpay acquisition was controversial. Announced at $29 billion in 2021, it closed in January 2022 at roughly half that after Block's own stock fell.

Buy-now-pay-later was already facing regulatory scrutiny and growing delinquency rates. Critics argued Dorsey overpaid at the peak of the market.

Afterpay's revenue growth slowed significantly after the acquisition, and write-offs on bad consumer debt increased. It remains the biggest bet Block has ever made.

The Bitcoin obsession worries investors. After renaming Square to Block in December 2021, Dorsey went all-in on Bitcoin — investing company cash in BTC, building Bitcoin mining hardware, and creating TBD (a Bitcoin-focused developer platform).

While Cash App's Bitcoin revenue is huge on paper ($10+ billion annually), the margins are tiny. Investors question whether the Bitcoin focus distracts from the core payments business.

Competition is intense on every front. Square competes with Stripe, Toast, and Clover for merchants.

Cash App competes with Venmo, Zelle, and Apple Pay for consumers. Afterpay competes with Klarna, Affirm, and bank-native BNPL products.

Block has to fight multiple wars simultaneously with finite resources.

Liquid AI

The honest problem is Goliath. OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, and Meta have raised tens of billions of dollars between them.

Liquid AI has raised under $300 million. The transformer architecture those giants use is battle-tested and improving fast.

Liquid AI has to prove its different approach not only works but keeps working as models get bigger. Betting against the most successful design in AI history is bold.

It is also the kind of bet that ends in either a great acquisition or a quiet shutdown, with not much room in between.

Block (Square)

Square is the merchant ecosystem — point-of-sale hardware, payment processing, invoicing, payroll, loans, and online stores for businesses of all sizes. Cash App is the consumer side — peer-to-peer payments, direct deposit, investing, Bitcoin buying, and the Cash App Card (a debit card).

Afterpay is the buy-now-pay-later product — split any purchase into four interest-free payments. Square Banking offers business checking accounts and loans.

Square Online lets merchants build e-commerce websites. TIDAL is the music streaming platform that pays artists higher royalties.

Liquid AI

The main products are the Liquid Foundation Models, a family that ships in several sizes so a customer can pick the smallest one that does the job. The second generation, LFM2, arrived in 2025, including LFM2-VL vision-language models built for phones, laptops, wearables and embedded chips.

The company has leaned hard into on-device AI rather than the cloud. The focus is always the same.

Match the quality of a much larger model while using a fraction of the memory and power.

Block (Square)

Khosla Ventures, Sequoia Capital, Kleiner Perkins, Visa, Goldman Sachs, GIC (Singapore)

Liquid AI

It started with a $37.5 million two-stage seed in December 2023 at a $303 million valuation, from OSS Capital, PagsGroup, Automattic (the company behind WordPress), Samsung Next and others. Angels included GitHub co-founder Tom Preston-Werner, Shopify's Tobi Lütke and Red Hat co-founder Bob Young.

Then AMD Ventures led the $250 million Series A in December 2024, which is unusual because AMD is a chipmaker, not a typical venture fund. That backing gave Liquid AI both money and a hardware ally.

When a major chip company writes the lead check on an efficiency-focused model maker, it signals a bet that the future of AI is not just bigger, it is leaner.