Who Owns Square?

Jack Dorsey and Jim McKelvey founded Square in St. Louis in 2009 around a hardware insight: a card reader that plugged into a smartphone headphone jack could turn anyone into a merchant. The first Square Reader sold for ten dollars and opened card acceptance to millions of small businesses that could not qualify for or afford traditional merchant accounts.

The brand expanded from payment acceptance into a full operating system for small businesses. Square Point of Sale replaced registers; Square for Restaurants and Square for Retail built vertical tools; Square Online added e-commerce after the Weebly acquisition; Square Capital, later Square Loans, lent against payment data; and Square Banking added business accounts and payroll. The company went public in 2015 on the NYSE as SQ.

International expansion built a presence in Canada, Japan, Australia, the UK, Ireland, France, and Spain. The 2022 acquisition of Afterpay embedded buy-now-pay-later across the seller network. The corporate rename to Block in December 2021 left Square as the seller brand specifically, while Cash App became the consumer counterpart.

The AI era repositioned the brand's story. Square launched AI-powered tools for sellers, introduced Square Bitcoin accepting crypto payments at point of sale, and in 2025 delivered accelerating GPV growth with what management called the strongest new volume added year on record. Square GPV reached $250 billion in FY2025 across 5.9 billion transactions from more than 800 million payment cards.