
$5B bet on 7 engineers: Stripe's gamble nobody vetted
Tempo raised $500 million at a $5 billion valuation backed by Stripe, OpenAI, Anthropic, and Visa. It promises 100,000 transactions per second. But there's one detail nobody mentions: the consensus engine that must hold everything together is built by Commonware, a 7-person startup with zero production history. And here's the kicker: Paradigm controls the CEO but didn't invest a dollar in the $500M Series A.










