Axios Pro Rata
By Dan Primack · Monday, May 4, 2026
✉️ Top of the morning. Plenty to chew on — let's get into it.

🟢 THE BFD

🚀 Stripe is acquiring Privy, the wallet-infrastructure startup, for an
   undisclosed sum that two sources peg "in the low nine figures." The
   deal closes Stripe's longest-running gap on stablecoin rails and pulls
   Privy's 35-person team into Stripe's payments infra org in San
   Francisco. Privy had previously raised $35M from Sequoia, Paradigm,
   and BlueYard.

   Why it matters: Stripe is buying its way into the next checkout layer
   before Visa or PayPal can.

💰 VENTURE CAPITAL

• 🇺🇸 Plaid raised $200M of employee secondary at an $8B valuation, led
  by Franklin Templeton with existing investors following on. The
  fintech-connectivity company is well off its 2021 peak but sources say
  ARR has crossed $400M, up from "high three hundreds" last year.

• 🇺🇸 Ramp closed a $300M Series F at a $22B valuation. Founders Fund
  led; Sequoia, Thrive, and Khosla followed on. CEO Eric Glyman tells
  Pro Rata the corporate-card company has crossed $1B in annualized
  revenue and will use the round to expand into Europe.

• 🇺🇸 Anthropic, PBC, the AI-safety company, is in advanced talks to
  raise a fresh primary round at a $200B+ valuation, per two sources
  familiar. Lightspeed is leading; existing backers Google and Spark
  expected to follow on. Closing targeted within 60 days.

• 🇺🇸 Linear, the project-management software maker, raised an $80M
  Series C at a $1.5B valuation. Accel led. The company says it has
  been profitable for 18 months and will use the round entirely on
  hiring.

• 🇺🇸 Mercury, the business-banking startup, raised a $300M Series D
  led by Sequoia at a $7B valuation.

• 🇺🇸 Vercel, the company behind Next.js, raised $300M in Series F at
  a $4B valuation. Greenoaks led.

🛒 M&A

• Figma is buying Modulz, a 12-person design-systems tooling team, for
  "primarily stock," per two sources. The deal closes Figma's gap on
  enterprise design tokens. Modulz founders will report to Figma's head
  of platform.

• Anduril picked up Apex Space, a satellite-bus manufacturer, for an
  estimated $400M in cash and stock. The deal expands Anduril's
  defense-space stack ahead of the next Pentagon contract cycle.

• Coinbase acquired Deribit, the crypto-options exchange, for $2.9B in
  cash and stock — the largest M&A deal in crypto history. The
  transaction closed Friday.

🪑 PEOPLE MOVES

• Databricks named Priya Krishnan, formerly head of AI products at
  Microsoft, as Chief AI Officer. Krishnan starts June 1 and reports
  directly to CEO Ali Ghodsi.

• Scale AI promoted David Kim to President. Kim has led Scale's federal
  business for the past three years and was instrumental in landing the
  company's CDAO contract.

• Notion poached Emily Rodriguez from Asana, where she ran enterprise
  GTM, to lead Notion's mid-market segment. Rodriguez starts next month.

• Notable: Dhivya Suryadevara, the former Stripe CFO who left in early
  2025, has joined Optum as President of Optum Financial. (This is a
  story about Suryadevara, not about Stripe.)

🚀 PRODUCT LAUNCHES

• OpenAI launched its long-rumored "Operator 2" agent SDK, opening up
  its computer-use capability to outside developers at $0.03 per action.

• Brex rolled out an AI receipt-matching feature that auto-reconciles
  expenses against card transactions. The company says it will be free
  for all customers through 2026.

📉 LAYOFFS & RESTRUCTURING

• Deel cut 8% of its workforce — primarily in engineering and recruiting.
  CEO Alex Bouaziz told employees the cuts were about "sharpening focus
  on AI-led product." The global-payroll firm raised a $300M Series E in
  late 2024.

🎙️ FINAL NUMBERS

The week's noise: a Bay Area design agency announced it's "going to
scale our practice into the European market." (Different "scale.") A
fintech CEO penned a 2,000-word LinkedIn essay on "the notion of
trust in financial services." (Different "notion.") Both made our
chuckle file.

✉️ Tips → dan@axios.com. See you tomorrow.