Square

Square, Inc. changed its name to Block, Inc. in December 2021. The company was founded in 2009 by Jack Dorsey and Jim McKelvey after McKelvey lost a $2,000 sale because he could not accept a credit card, and it began developing it in a small office in St. Louis. Its first product was a card reader and point of sale system for small merchants; it later added Cash App (2013), lending, payroll and banking, and bought Afterpay, Tidal and Weebly. Block's principal office is now in Oakland, California.

Square raised angel money from investors including Marissa Mayer, Kevin Rose, Biz Stone and Dennis Crowley. Its Series A came from Khosla Ventures, its Series B from Sequoia Capital and its Series C from Kleiner Perkins. Visa invested in April 2011, when the company was reportedly valued at about $240 million. The Series D included Citi Ventures, Rizvi Traverse Management and Starbucks, which reportedly invested $25 million in 2012, and the Series E included Goldman Sachs, Rizvi Traverse and GIC. Square was valued at $6 billion in October 2014. In its IPO prospectus, Khosla Ventures III held 16.6 percent of the company, JPMC Strategic Investments 5.5 percent, Rizvi Traverse 5.3 percent and Sequoia Capital 5.2 percent.

Square priced its IPO on November 19, 2015 at $9.00 per share, selling 27 million Class A shares on the NYSE under the ticker SQ, for a market capitalization of about $2.9 billion, below its last private valuation. The company had lost $420 million since 2012 at the time of listing. It closed the $29 billion all stock acquisition of Afterpay in January 2022, changed its ticker to XYZ in January 2025 and joined the S&P 500 in July 2025. For 2024, Block reported revenue of $24.12 billion, net income of $2.9 billion and gross payment volume of $240.81 billion. In February 2026 it announced layoffs of more than 4,000 of roughly 10,000 employees.

Square's history includes a down round IPO. Its Series E investors bought at the $6 billion private valuation and then saw the company list at $2.9 billion, though those shares carried different rights from the common stock sold in the IPO. Early backers did far better: Khosla Ventures and Sequoia Capital entered at the Series A and Series B and remained 5 percent holders at the IPO about six years after founding, with the company's revenue later growing to more than $24 billion a year.