Dive Brief:

• Stripe CFO Steffan Tomlinson has been appointed to the board of directors for AI start-up Vercel, the company announced in a Tuesday press release.
• Tomlinson’s appointment comes as the San Francisco, California-based Vercel — which provides cloud infrastructure and other tools for software developers — looks to build out its technology suite following the close of a $250 million investment funding round in May, giving it a valuation of $3.25 billion at that time. Stripe, alongside online furniture brand Wayfair and clothing brand Under Armour, is a Vercel customer, according to the May release.
• “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,” Vercel CFO Marten Abrahamsen said in a statement sent to CFO Dive.

Dive Insight:

Tomlinson’s addition follows Vercel’s appointment of Abrahamsen as its CFO this July, according to his LinkedIn profile. Abrahamsen was previously CFO of small business capital solutions provider Fundbox.

Tomlinson’s experience “leading developer-focused companies from start-up 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 in the release.

An alum of Big Tech firms, including Google and Palo Alto Networks, Tomlinson has served as finance chief for San Francisco, California-based payments processor Stripe since September 2023, according to his LinkedIn profile. His previous roles include stints as CFO for Palo Alto Networks and as CFO for Google’s cloud & technical infrastructure.

Vercel’s move to add Tomlinson to its board comes as it aims to make a splash in generative AI — following in the footsteps of Stripe, a darling of the payments world and one of the world’s largest start-ups.

“What Stripe did for payments, Vercel is doing for the cloud — building a scalable, secure, developer-first platform,” Rauch said in the release.

Vercel has earmarked its newest round of funding for the further development of its generative AI products, including its “v0” tool — which utilizes generative AI prompts to help developers code, according to their May announcement.

Vercel will be building out its tools as funding continues to flood into the generative AI space. Funding for AI companies across various sectors, including robotics, security and healthcare, reached over $14 billion last month, according to data from Crunchbase.

The size of investment rounds can mean generative AI start-ups will need to raise exponentially more funding to avoid “down rounds,” which can constrict their valuation and further hamper the flow of future capital — an issue that may be familiar to Tomlinson as CFO for Stripe.

While the payments processor reached a $95 billion valuation in 2021, thanks to the spike in e-commerce during the COVID-19 pandemic, recent shifts — including a rightsizing in the retail world, inflation, and geopolitical upheaval — have since impacted the rate of growth for the company, according to a July report from the media outlet Quartz. In a September transaction with venture firm Sequoia Capital, Stripe was valued at $70 billion.