Block

Block builds payment, commerce and financial services tools for businesses and consumers. Square helps sellers accept payments and manage commerce, inventory and reporting, while Cash App lets consumers spend, send and store money. Afterpay provides buy now, pay later options. Its broader product family includes Bitkey for bitcoin self-custody, Proto for bitcoin mining products and services, and TIDAL for music.

Jim McKelvey and Jack Dorsey founded the company as Square in 2009, addressing small merchants’ difficulty accepting card payments. Its engineering work also extends to open-source developer tools. Goose is an on-machine agent that generates or modifies code and can invoke shell commands, Python and plugins. Block collaborated with Anthropic on the Model Context Protocol, which standardizes language models’ access to tools and data, contributed its Rust implementation, and uses it for Goose extensions.

Block completed its acquisition of Afterpay in 2022 for a reported $13.9 billion in stock at closing, bringing installment payments into its merchant and consumer offerings. The company reported 59 million Cash App monthly transacting active accounts in June 2026. Its AI systems use a shared internal platform for model access, routing, tools and permissions, with evaluations designed to assess quality independently of the underlying models.