Robotics Startup Will Make a Marble Bust of Your Dog for $10,000

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
photosof 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 ...