Subvolts take Stripe builds AI for payments, turning data into a compounding advantage. Sep 25, 2025 - Developers
- Learn how Stripe builds and deploys AI models for critical financial infrastructure and fraud detection.
- Business
- Understand how AI can create compounding advantages in payments and enable AI companies to monetize and scale.
This interview provides a detailed look at AI implementation at a major financial infrastructure company.
Stripe's Payments Foundation Model: How Data & Infra Create Compounding Advantage, w/ Emily Sands
Audio streams from Erik Torenberg, Nathan Labenz. Your place is remembered on this device.
From Subvolts
Summary and analysis by Subvolts editorial, AI-assisted.
Emily Sands, Stripe's head of data and AI, discusses the company's payments foundation model on The Cognitive Revolution. The model processes billions of transactions into embeddings, enhancing fraud detection. Sands also explores Stripe's modular AI deployment approach across its $1.4 trillion payment network and its role in enabling AI companies to monetize and scale globally.
Stripe uses AI to understand billions of payments, making them safer and helping businesses grow. This helps AI companies themselves make money and scale up worldwide.
This episode offers insight into how a major financial infrastructure company leverages AI for core operations. Listeners will learn about building and deploying large-scale AI models for critical tasks like fraud detection and monetization. It's relevant for AI practitioners, fintech professionals, and business leaders interested in AI's practical applications. The discussion on enabling AI companies aligns with current industry efforts by Google Gemini, Anthropic, and others to support AI ecosystem growth.
- HostNathan Labenz
- GuestEmily Sandshead of data and AI, Stripe
- Guest: Emily Sands, head of data and AI at Stripe
- Show: The Cognitive Revolution
- Length: 81 minutes
- Stripe's Scale: Processes $1.4 trillion annually
- AI Company Partnerships: Two-thirds of Forbes AI 50 companies run on Stripe
Today, Emily Sands, head of data and AI at Stripe, joins The Cognitive Revolution to discuss how the company built a payments foundation model that processes tens of billions of transactions into dense embeddings, exploring the technical architecture behind fraud detection improvements and the modular approach that enables rapid deployment of AI across Stripe's $1.4 trillion payment network.
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Stripe's Scale: Processes $1.4 trillion annually, serving both small businesses and large enterprises (over half of Fortune 100 companies).
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"Business in a Box": There's emerging potential for AI to handle end-to-end business creation, including selection of third-party tools, payment providers, and other essential services.
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AI Company Partnerships: Two-thirds of the Forbes AI 50 companies already run on Stripe, as they focus on helping AI companies monetize effectively and scale globally.
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- embeddings
- Emily Sands
- numerical representations of data that capture meaning and relationships
- foundation model
- Emily Sands
- a large AI model trained on broad data that can be adapted for many tasks
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Questions people ask
- What is Stripe's payments foundation model?
- It is a model that processes tens of billions of transactions into dense embeddings to improve fraud detection and other functions.
- How does Stripe help AI companies?
- Stripe focuses on helping AI companies monetize effectively and scale globally, with two-thirds of Forbes AI 50 companies already running on Stripe.
Page generated Oct 19, 2026. Summaries are Subvolts' own; the audio, artwork and notes belong to Erik Torenberg, Nathan Labenz.