Aug 26, 2025 5 min read Daily Rundown

⛵ $100B Game

More Stories: SAP’s Walls Crumble, Perplexity Buys Peace

Good Morning, Early Adopters!

The game isn’t just about scale anymore—it’s about who rewrites the rules while everyone else is still playing by them.

BUBBLE

AI Valuations Go Nuclear — $100B Is Just Table Stakes

👀 What’s the move: Databricks is sealing a K-round north of $100B. Anthropic, not to be outdone, is shopping a $10B raise at a $170B tag. These aren’t financing rounds — they’re land grabs to be crowned “the next trillion-dollar AI empire.”

💡 Why it’s not boring: Past bubbles ran on hype; this one runs on sovereign funds and institutional FOMO. The scale is obscene: dot-com was casinos, crypto was poker — AI is governments underwriting moonshots with balance sheets bigger than countries. And when $100B feels cheap, you know gravity has left the chat.

⛵ Key takeaway: The AI bubble isn’t inflating — it’s industrializing. Welcome to the first mania priced in GDP, not market cap.

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The Future of Customer Communication

CloudTalk isn’t just another cloud call center—it’s where AI voice agents take the lead in transforming how businesses talk to customers. The AI voice agents handle repetitive inquiries, route calls intelligently, and provide instant answers—reducing wait times and boosting customer satisfaction.

For AI-driven companies, CloudTalk’s AI voice agents act as a growth multiplier:

Automate first-line support and free up human agents.
Personalize conversations with data-driven intelligence.
Turn every call into structured insights for product and user research.

👉 In short: CloudTalk = global telephony + AI voice agents + seamless CRM workflows — a communication engine ready for the AI era.

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SAAS

AI-Native Firms Dismantle SAP & Salesforce Moats

👀 What’s the move: Bessemer Venture Partners just released a new Roadmap arguing that the moat around SAP, Salesforce, and other “Systems of Record” (SoR) vendors is cracking. For decades, these giants thrived on expensive implementations, vendor lock-in, and control of mission-critical data. Now, AI-native challengers are shifting the market from passive “record-keeping” to active “systems of action.” Instead of just storing data, these platforms capture it automatically and translate it into workflows, insights, and decisions in real time—at a fraction of the cost.

💡 Why it’s not boring: This isn’t just a product upgrade, it’s a business model shift. Legacy players sold licenses and multi-year consulting projects; AI-native companies sell automation and outcomes. They not only tap into software budgets but also siphon off the billions spent annually on system integrators, consultants, and outsourced IT. The wedge is already visible: AI tools that auto-fill CRM data, auto-generate ERP workflows, or quietly build knowledge graphs from Slack and Zoom. Each wedge becomes a migration path away from the incumbents’ lock-in. SAP and Salesforce aren’t just losing features—they’re losing the stickiness of their entire ecosystem.

⛵ Key takeaway: AI isn’t just selling software—it’s stealing the service revenue streams that made legacy vendors untouchable.

Perplexity Buys Peace With Publishers

👀 What’s the move: Perplexity just launched Comet Plus, a $5/month add-on (bundled free with Pro/Max) that promises to share revenue with publishers whenever their content is clicked, cited in AI answers, or used by its browsing agents. Backed with a $42.5M pool, the company is effectively creating a micropayments system for journalism inside AI search.

💡 Why it’s not boring: This isn’t charity; it’s a survival hedge. By cutting in publishers early, Perplexity dodges lawsuits, builds a moat of licensed data, and sets itself up as the “ethical” AI search engine versus OpenAI and Google. If it works, publishers may shift from suing LLMs to preferring the ones that pay—reshaping which AI platforms get access to the highest-quality content. That flips the game from training-data theft to data-supply contracts.

⛵ Key takeaway: Perplexity isn’t just monetizing AI search—it’s turning copyright headaches into a distribution alliance.

STARTUP SPOT

🛒 Robomart
“Autonomous store on wheels.”
L4 EV with 10 climate-controlled lockers, 500 lb payload, 112-mile range; batch delivers orders at flat $3.
→ Founded 2018 in LA by Ali Ahmed, Emad Rahim, Tigran Shahverdyan; pilots with Unilever, Mars, Stop & Shop. Aug 2025 launching RM5 fleet in Austin to scale autonomous marketplaces.

🧾 Verint
“AI CX automation, going private.”
Open Platform unifies AI bots, workforce management, analytics, and customer-experience automation across channels.
→ Founded 1994 (ex-Comverse spinoff), HQ Melville NY; ~10,000 clients in 175+ countries, 3,700 staff. Aug 2025: Thoma Bravo to acquire for $2B ($20.50/share, 18% premium); will merge with Calabrio post-close.

🛒 DoorDash
“AI logistics, food to everything.”
App-driven marketplace + white-label delivery; ML optimizes routing, multi-modal network (drones, robots, DashPass, Wolt+).
→ Founded 2013 by Tony Xu, Andy Fang, Stanley Tang, Evan Moore; IPO 2020; now ~56% U.S. share, 40+ markets via Wolt + Deliveroo. Q2 2025 GAAP net income $285M (vs –$157M YoY), Adj. EBITDA $655M; 2025 moves: acquired Deliveroo ($3.9B), SevenRooms ($1.2B), issued $2B convertibles.

BAY AREA MEMOS

Robomart launched its new autonomous delivery robot RM5 with a $3 flat fee, aiming to rival DoorDash and Uber Eats.
Thoma Bravo is buying Verint for $2B to merge with Calabrio and expand in CX automation.
Cloudflare has introduced new zero-trust security features to help enterprises safely manage generative AI use and prevent data leaks.
Nvidia announced the launch of its next-gen Jetson AGX Thor, an AI “supercomputer brain” for robots across industries.
Elon Musk’s xAI is suing Apple and OpenAI, accusing them of creating an AI monopoly through the iPhone’s built-in ChatGPT and App Store practices.

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