The acquisitions are meant to aid the blockchain network’s stablecoin strategy, said Polygon Labs CEO Marc Boiron and Polygon Foundation founder Sandeep Nailwal in an interview. The Seattle-based Coinme, which specializes in converting cash into crypto and is known for its work with crypto ATMs, has a suite of money transmitter licenses in the U.S. Meanwhile, New York-based Sequence builds out blockchain infrastructure, including crypto wallets.

Polygon Labs’ acquisitions of the two startups puts it in competition with the fintech giant Stripe, said Nailwal. Over the past year, the payments giant bought a stablecoin startup, a crypto wallet firm, and backed its own blockchain focused on payments. The Stripe acquisitions signalled an intention to own every layer of the stablecoin stack, from the servers that process payments to the accounts where users hold crypto. 

“It’s a reverse Stripe in a way,” Nailwal said of Polygon’s stablecoin play. Stripe first acquired its stablecoin startups and then built out its own blockchain. In contrast, Polygon already has a longstanding network of blockchains, and it’s bringing on startups to build on top of it. “Polygon Labs is becoming a full-blown fintech company,” said Nailwal.

Stablecoin shift

The push from Polygon Labs into payments comes amid a wave of hype for stablecoins, or cryptocurrencies that are pegged to real-world assets like the U.S. dollar. Especially after President Donald Trump signed into law in July a new bill regulating the tokens, fintechs, tech companies, and even banks have said they’ll launch their own stablecoins, which proponents say are an upgrade over decades-old financial infrastructure.

Polygon Labs, whose blockchain network sits on top of Ethereum, is aiming to ride this wave of enthusiasm. Best known for its prominence during the NFT boom of 2021 and 2022, Polygon has made significant investments in payments over the past year, even poaching Stripe’s head of crypto, John Egan. 

The deal for Coinme, its latest payments play, was for between $100 and $125 million, reported CoinDesk, which implies that the price for  Sequence was somewhere between $125 and $150 million. But Boiron, the CEO of Polygon Labs, pushed back on the reporting. “Almost everything that CoinDesk wrote in that article is wrong,” he said.

He also said he wasn’t worried about Coinme’s legal struggles. In 2025, regulators in California and Washington targeted the crypto company for violations that included a failure to stop customers from taking out more than $1,000 in a day from the firm’s affiliated crypto ATMs. Washington regulators agreed to stay a cease-and-desist order against Coinme a month after going after the startup. 

“I think they go far beyond what is required,” said Boiron, in reference to Coinme’s compliance regime. “On the back end, the way that they handle being able to limit risk to users, I think is state of the art.”

The tool, which the company describes as “Claude Code for the rest of your work,” leverages the abilities of Anthropic’s popular Claude Code software development assistant but is designed for non-technical users as opposed to programmers.

Many have pointed out that Claude Code is already more of a general-use agent than a developer-specific tool. It is capable of spinning up apps that perform functions for users across other software. But non-developers have been put off by Claude Code’s name and also the fact that Claude Code needs to be used with a coding-specific interface.

Some of the use cases Anthropic showcased for Claude Cowork include reorganizing downloads, turning receipt screenshots into expense spreadsheets, and producing first drafts from notes across a user’s desktop. Anthropic has described the tool, which can work autonomously, as “less like a back-and-forth and more like leaving messages for a coworker.”

Anthropic reportedly built Cowork in approximately a week and a half, largely using Claude Code itself, according to the head of Claude Code, Boris Cherny.

“This is a general agent that looks well positioned to bring the wildly powerful capabilities of Claude Code to a wider audience,” Simon Willison, a UK-based programmer, wrote of the tool. “I would be very surprised if Gemini and OpenAI don’t follow suit with their own offerings in this category.”

Enterprise AI race

With Cowork, Anthropic is now competing more directly with tools like Microsoft’s Copilot for the enterprise productivity market. The company’s strategy of starting with a developer-focused agent and then making it accessible to everyone else could give it an edge, as Cowork will inherit the already-proven capabilities of Claude Code rather than being built as a consumer assistant from scratch. This approach could make Anthropic—which is already reportedly outpacing rival OpenAI in enterprise adoption—an increasingly attractive option for businesses looking for AI tools that can handle work autonomously.

Like any other AI agent, Claude Cowork comes with security risks, particularly around “prompt injections,” where attackers trick LLMs into changing course by inserting malicious, hidden instructions into webpages, images, links, or any content found on the open web. Anthropic addressed the issue directly in the announcement, warning users about the risks and offering advice such as limiting access to trusted sites when using the Claude in Chrome extension.

The company, however, acknowledged the tool was still vulnerable to these attacks, despite Anthropic’s defenses: “We’ve built sophisticated defenses against prompt injections, but agent safety—that is, the task of securing Claude’s real-world actions—is still an active area of development in the industry…We recommend taking precautions, particularly while you learn how it works.”

The launch has also sparked concern among startup founders about the competitive threat posed by major AI labs bundling agent capabilities into their core products. Cowork’s ability to handle file organization, document generation, and data extraction overlaps with dozens of AI startups that have raised funding to solve these specific problems.

For startups building applications on top of models from major AI companies, the concern about foundational AI labs building a similar functionality as part of their base product is a common one. In response to these concerns, many startups have argued that companies with deep domain expertise or a better user experience for specific workflows may still maintain defensible positions in the market.

That’s a key finding of Deloitte’s latest CFO Signals Spotlight report, released this morning. Half of the finance chiefs surveyed named digital transformation as their foremost priority for 2026, followed by cash management optimization and capital allocation. The findings are based on a recent Q4 survey of 200 CFOs across industries at North American companies with at least $1 billion in annual revenue.

Steve Gallucci, global and U.S. leader of Deloitte’s CFO Program, told me the shift reflects how finance leaders are moving from exploration to execution when it comes to technology—particularly AI.

“Efficiency and productivity are certainly part of the equation,” Gallucci said. “But more broadly, we’ve been on this digital evolution for some time.”

In recent years, as advanced technologies like agentic AI burst onto the scene, boards and C-suite leaders have shown increasing interest. Finance chiefs took a cautious approach to implementing these tools. Deloitte’s Finance Trends report finds that finance leaders are now influencing enterprise strategy, driving cost optimization, advancing digital transformation, and building tech-enabled teams.

Last year, many companies focused on testing, creating use cases, and developing comfort with AI, Gallucci noted. But according to the Q4 survey, 87% of CFOs said AI will be extremely or very important to how their finance departments operate in 2026.

“What we’re seeing in some of the answers to the Q4 survey questions is that continued evolution,” Gallucci said. Finance leaders are taking a more deliberate, enterprise-wide approach to transformation and AI is accelerating that commitment, he added.

The report outlines six key areas CFOs plan to prioritize this year: Leveraging digital tools to transform finance operations; going all in on AI; embedding AI agents directly into finance workflows; keeping close watch on changes in buyer behavior; tapping internal talent to manage costs; and exploring more deal-making opportunities.

CFOs also appear focused on redeploying existing finance talent to work alongside AI-driven systems. About half of respondents said their organizations plan to hire or promote internally to help keep worker costs in line for 2026.

As CFOs and finance leaders lean into digital transformation, there’s an expectation that they’re going to have to reskill their existing talent, Gallucci said.

“We’re not seeing a decline in the number of finance professionals as a result of investments in technology and AI,” he said. But as leaders look to the future—both in finance and across the broader enterprise—they are increasingly focused on boosting productivity through technology and combining those tools with the skills of their existing workforce and an agentic digital workforce, he explained.

Competition and consumer dynamics add pressure

While technology transformation tops the agenda, competitive pressure remains a driving force. About half of CFOs cited rising competition as having the biggest impact on their companies, followed closely by shifts in customer behavior and demographics.

Competitive pressures are always near the top of CFOs’ minds, Gallucci said. But what’s different now is how they’re responding—looking across industries to see how others are using AI and digital tools, and applying those lessons quickly, he said.

Gallucci also pointed to evolving consumer demand as a key factor to watch, particularly as major banks and retailers release their fourth-quarter earnings.

There’s evidence of a K-shaped economy, he added. “CFOs are paying close attention to what that means for growth, pricing, and investment strategy.”

Sheryl Estrada
sheryl.estrada@fortune.com

Leaderboard

Clare Kennedy was appointed CFO of Spencer Stuart, a global advisory firm, effective Jan. 12. Kennedy succeeds Christine Laurens as part of a planned succession and in support of Laurens’ retirement from full-time executive work. Kennedy, who is based in London, joins Spencer Stuart from Maples Group, an international advisory firm, where she served as global chief operating officer. She joined Maples Group from Freshfields, an international law firm, where she served as its global CFO. Kennedy previously spent 18 years at Linklaters, an international law firm, where she held a variety of senior finance and commercial leadership roles. She began her career at Arthur Andersen and EY as a chartered accountant, specializing in tax. 

Gillian Munson was appointed CFO of Duolingo, Inc. (NASDAQ: DUOL), a mobile learning platform, effective Feb. 23. Matt Skaruppa will step down after nearly six years with the company; he will remain CFO until Munson starts her new role, at which time he will assume an advisory role. Munson assumes the CFO role after serving on the Duolingo board of directors since 2019 as chair of the audit, risk and compliance committee. She was most recently the CFO of Vimeo and previously held CFO positions at Iora Health, Inc. and XO Group Inc.

Big Deal

A joint statement on Monday from tech giants Apple and Google announced that they have entered into a multi-year collaboration under which the next generation of Apple Foundation Models will be based on Google’s Gemini models and cloud technology. These models are said to power future Apple Intelligence features, including a more personalized Siri coming this year. 

The tech giants stated: “After careful evaluation, Apple determined that Google’s AI technology provides the most capable foundation for Apple Foundation Models and is excited about the innovative new experiences it will unlock for Apple users. Apple Intelligence will continue to run on Apple devices and Private Cloud Compute, while maintaining Apple’s industry-leading privacy standards.” 

Google and others took the early lead in the AI race, while Apple’s iPhone has lagged rivals on some AI features. Following earlier AI missteps, the Cupertino, Calif.-based company acknowledged last year that a major Siri upgrade would not arrive until sometime in 2026. 

“This is what the Street has been waiting for with the elephant in the room for Cupertino revolving around its invisible AI strategy, but we believe this is an incremental positive to both AAPL and GOOGL,” Wedbush Securities analysts wrote in a Monday note on the Apple–Google partnership. Wedbush maintains an Outperform rating on Apple and continues to target a $350 price for the stock. 

Going deeper

“Trump threatens to keep ‘too cute’ Exxon out of Venezuela after CEO provides reality check on ‘uninvestable’ industry” is a Fortune article by Jordan Blum.

Blum writes: “As other oil executives lavished President Trump with praise at the White House, Exxon Mobil CEO Darren Woods bluntly said the Venezuelan oil industry is currently ‘uninvestable,’ and that major reforms are required before even considering committing the many billions of dollars required to revitalize the country’s dilapidated crude business. Read the complete article here. 

Overheard

“Buying a movie studio is hardly buying secure, hard assets.”

—Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, Yale professor and founder of the Yale Chief Executive Leadership Institute, and Stephen Henriques, a senior research fellow, write in a Fortune opinion piece titled “A Cautionary Hollywood Tale: The Ellisons’ Lose-Lose Paramount Positioning” regarding the multiple bids for Warner Bros. Discovery.