Happy Monday!
Welcome to your weekly breakdown of all things AI Assistant and the agentic economy.
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All the best,
David
What’s Trending?
Wabi raised $55M at a $1.25B valuation Wabi, the multiplayer agent that builds mini-apps you share with friends, raised $55M at a $1.25B valuation. IVP led the round, with a16z, Forerunner, the Alexa Fund, Tobi Lütke and Marc Benioff joining. It's the first multiplayer agent app valued at more than $1B. |  |
Two new agents come out of stealth Rocker came out of stealth with $12.85M for an enterprise AI assistant. It runs in the customer's cloud and catches the "oh shit" moments managers would otherwise miss. Robyn launched invite-only as a "personal agentic platform" that spins up a fleet of agents that already know your context from a single sentence. |  |
Anthropic filed it’s S-1 to go public Anthropic filed an S-1 with the SEC for an IPO and plans to list on Nasdaq under the ticker ANT. The filing covers Class A common stock, and it means Anthropic's finances will become public for the first time. The number of shares and the price range haven't been set yet. |  |
AI Assistant Competition Updates
Instinct is reportedly raising at a $30B valuation. They’ve also added an Action Button shortcut, Link balance, opened group chats to everyone, added Shop Pay at any store, partnered with OpenTable, and expanded its 1Password partnership.
Ollie announced it's shutting down Nov 6, saying it couldn't keep up once Muse, Instinct and others entered the space.
ChatGPT added iCloud Mail and Calendar which lends it to operate like an AI agent
Pally launched city lookup to find everyone you know, Inbox Triage, Money Back and Bills & Renewals, and added shopping at 23 stores.
Tomo launched Community recommendations and Selective Context for group chats.
Fo launched Fompt Feed and is live on Slack and email cc.
Grok Bot shipped Vault, 1Password and Apple app integrations and showed shared bots its sales team built.
The Agentic Economy
McKinsey: McKinsey surveyed about 21,000 consumers across 11 markets and found more than half now use AI to shop. In the US, the rate of AI users finishing a purchase with AI jumped 70% from last year. For people using AI, AI search is three times as influential as regular search, and stand-alone AI tools beat retailers' own assistants until checkout. |  |
Ken Huang: No single agentic commerce standard is going to win. Instead, the stack is splitting into layers: Stripe, Visa, Mastercard, Google and x402 handle checkout and settlement, while MCP and the Agent Name Service handle context and discovery. The buyer's agent becomes its own payment actor, holding the credential while the card networks hold the risk. |  |
Browserbase: Browserbase launched BELL, an open-source kit for building your own personal assistant. Browserbase for the browser, eve by Vercel for the agent, Linq for iMessage and Link by Stripe for payments. |  |
Agents in the Wild! An Agent…
switched a GEICO policy to Progressive, saving $1,174 a year.
found and hired a person for a day of promo work at $149.
caught two years of double billing and got $834 back from Terminix.
cleared a busy office room by offering people other rooms.
negotiated an internet bill down from $99.99 to $54.99.
is logging spam texts as possible legal violations worth $500 to $1,500 each.
noticed non-English IMAX tickets and got a refund, avoided the wrong language.
read phone and internet bills and saved about €469 a year.
Prompt of the Week
On Deck
Hello World by Linq Hello World is on Nov 3 and brings together founders, engineers and investors who are building agentic products and infrastructure. The speakers come from Skye, OpenAI, Town, Stripe, DoorDash, Lindy, Browserbase and a16z. That's a good spread of the companies in this newsletter, from assistants to payments to the browser infrastructure agents run on. |  |