(Bloomberg) -- For attendees at payment processing company Stripe Inc.’s annual conference this week, it was impossible to miss: A six-foot Renaissance-style Carrara marble statue of a nude man clutching an expired Stripe test credit card, displayed in an expo hall at San Francisco’s Moscone Center. Naturally, people snapped photos of it during lunch.
Memes proliferated. And there were questions, such as whether John or Patrick Collison — Stripe’s co-founder brothers — had posed for the sculpture. (During an onstage question and answer session on Thursday, they said they were not the inspiration.
) In typical Silicon Valley style, the sculpture came from a startup. The creator, Monumental Labs, uses a robotic arm to mill blocks of stone into everything from a client’s dog to the (literally and figuratively) cheeky guy at the conference. Monumental Labs was founded in 2022 by Micah Springut, a tech entrepreneur and marble-carving hobbyist, in hopes of making it orders of magnitude faster and cheaper to produce stone sculptures with the aid of technology rather than carving them by hand.
It’s one of a handful of companies using a CNC — that’s “computer numerical control" — robot to sculpt marble. The process currently involves programming all the detailed tool moves required to make a given sculpture, which is a time- and human-intensive process the company plans to eventually automate. The Stripe statue was New York-based Monumental Labs’ first corporate.
