el producto #452 🚀
OpenAI buys Statsig, Atlassian buys AI browser, Gemini-powered Siri, Amazon's AI Agents, Product Leadership in the AI era, Boosting brands AI visibility & more
Hi friends 👋
Happy weekend, and welcome to a new edition of el producto
🎰 The week in figures
$150B: U.S. software companies have spent more buying AI companies this year than the prior three years combined with $150B spent on M&A activity so far. The driving force behind this is the disruptive effect of AI on SaaS companies
$14B: Klarna targets up to $14B valuation in eagerly awaited US IPO. The BNPL lender aims to raise $1.27B
$13B: Anthropic closed a $13B Series F at $183B. Its AI revenue soared from $1B to $5B in eight months, serving 300,000+ businesses. The funding will enhance capacity, safety, and global expansion
$2B: Mistral AI, the French AI startup, is approaching a $2B+ investment, boosting its valuation to $14B to challenge Silicon Valley with its open-source AI solutions
$1.1B: OpenAI buys Statsig, an AI product testing start-up which specializes in A/B testing and using real-time data to improve products, for $1.1B
$1B: Ramp just hit $1B in annualized revenue, hot on the heels of a $22.5B valuation
$610M: Atlassian has agreed to acquire the Browser Company (makers of Dia, which I’m using right now) for $610M to build what it calls the “Knowledge Worker’s Browser”. The vision is to build a browser that can interact with multiple different SaaS products
$340M: ID.me raised a $340M Series E to enhance digital identity solutions and combat AI-driven fraud. It currently serves 152M users
$300M: IQM, the finnish quantum computing startup has become a unicorn with a $300M Series B to expand into the U.S., enhance its quantum hardware and software, and deploy 150-qubit systems, while considering local U.S. assembly to drive sales
$85M: Exa, a San Fran startup developing an AI-centric search engine secured a $85M Series B at a $700M valuation
4k: Salesforce cuts 4,000 customer support jobs after implementing AI agents that now handle half of all customer conversations
~40% of Coinbase’s code is now AI-generated - with a target to reach 50% by October
📰 What’s going on
OpenAI has announced it’s developing an AI-powered hiring platform—The OpenAI Jobs Platform—which will launch sometime in 2026, and will connect businesses with top AI talent. OpenAI will also start awarding “certifications for different levels of AI fluency” via the OpenAI Academy, aiming to certify 10M people by 2030, starting with Walmart, which will roll out AI training to its workforce
OpenAI now lets you branch chats, letting you more easily explore different directions without losing your original thread
Claude Pro users can now have Claude reference past chats, making it easier to pick up where you left off by asking it to reference your last convo. You can toggle this setting on or off here
DeepSeek plans to release a major AI agent by the end of 2025 that would rival OpenAI through cost-effective, open-source models with token pricing 4-8 times cheaper than OpenAI
Microsoft launches first in-house models: MAI-Voice-1 AI and MAI-1-preview. Microsoft’s complicated partnership with OpenAI is adding a new twist as it releases AI models that will compete with GPT-5, DeepSeek, and all the rest
Apple looks to Google Gemini for Siri upgrade. Apple and Google reached a formal agreement this week that will see Apple testing a Google AI model in Siri. The future version of Siri would be more capable of looking up information across the web without linking to external services. With Google already paying Apple $20B a year to be the default search engine, how much will it pay for this?
Meta's AI leaders also discussed using Google's Gemini and OpenAI's models to power Meta AI and other features in their social media apps as temporary measures while developing their own models
Google updates NotebookLM. NotebookLM now lets users customize the tone of the speakers in its audio podcasts. When generating an Audio Overview, users can now choose whether they want their AI podcasts to be formatted as a “Deep Dive,” “Brief,” “Critique,” or “Debate.” After recent data showed declining traffic to NotebookLM, the real question is whether or not these types of audio overviews have any lasting power now that the initial novelty has worn off
Google has also updated Vids with a new feature that lets you import Google Slides as source materials for creating video content in Vids. This is super handy for scenarios where you want to quickly transform assets like product roadmaps and strategy decks into videos that can be shared with stakeholders
Google revealed the winners of its first AI Development Kit hackathon. The grand prize went to a multi-agent architecture for lead generation and sales development with an honorable mention for a Visual AI agent tool that lets users describe the agent they want to build in plain language. Check out the list for some inspiration!
Google Photos upgrades its image-to-video feature with Veo3
Amazon has unveiled a new feature called “Lens Live”. When users with Lens Live open Amazon Lens, the Lens camera will instantly begin scanning products and show top matching items in a swipeable carousel at the bottom of the screen, allowing for quick comparisons. Lens Live also integrates Amazon’s AI shopping assistant, Rufus, to offer users product insights, summaries, and answer questions as you browse
Amazon is also reported to be entering the AI Agent space. It’s currently testing a new suite of workplace software products internally called Quick Suite. Quick Suite will merge some of AWS's existing products, such as its data analysis product QuickSight and its AI chatbot Q Business, while also adding a new product called Quick Flows. Quick Flows would offer pre-built workflows that let customers automate tasks through natural language prompts and Quick Suite will include a "deep research agent" to generate reports from company and external data
PayPal and Venmo are giving free year subscriptions to Perplexity Pro and early access to Comet browser. Perplexity Pro costs $200/year. PayPal and Venmo users will be able to access the offer directly in their respective apps. Users only get one invite per PayPal account, and they can’t already be Perplexity Pro customers
X expands XChat encrypted messaging to non-premium users, looking to rival Signal, WhatsApp
xAI has launched a “speedy and economical” agentic coding model, called “grok-code-fast-1”, which can complete a wide range of coding tasks autonomously
LinkedIn rolls out AI-powered hiring assistant globally. The tool is set to integrate with applicant tracking systems (ATS), enabling recruiters to evaluate all candidates, regardless of whether they applied on or off LinkedIn
WordPress launches AI development tool. WordPress co-founder and Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg described as a “V0 or Lovable, but specifically for WordPress”
Stripe and Paradigm unveiled Tempo, a payments blockchain designed with OpenAI and Anthropic as partners to enable AI agents to autonomously conduct financial transactions at scale
📚 Good reads
Google’s Product Leader for Gemini outlines his reasons why he believes less than 70 PMs currently have the necessary skillset to be AI PMs - and what you can do to learn them
A designer’s guide to prompting Google Nano Banana for smarter UI. Google’s Nano Banana (aka Gemini 2.5 Flash Image) makes generating and editing UI concepts a breeze with natural language prompts. The article serves up practical templates for ideation, wireframing, and component design, plus pro tips to get the most out of your prompts. If you want AI to feel less like a wild card and more like your design intern, this is your playbook
[Podcast] How AI is shaking up product leadership roles and skills. Julie Zhuo, one of my referents, dishes on how AI is turning the classic product trio into a skill-based builder fest, making old-school job titles feel a bit vintage. Managers now juggle people, process, and purpose—with AI agents in the mix—while learning to trust, experiment, and embrace being beginners all over again. Complement with this leadership guide to staying ahead in the age of AI. A new handbook from OpenAI for tech leaders about how to stay ahead in the age of AI. It covers 5 core principles that all tech leaders should consider when crafting their AI strategy: Align, Activate, Amplify, Accelerate, and Govern
[Podcast] AI agents are changing the game for PMs. AI agents now actually get work done, from research to building prototypes. IBM’s Armand Ruiz breaks down why RAG systems rule the enterprise and how PMs can manage way more with fewer hands
Designing & implementing evals for Product Talk’s Interview Coach. Teresa Torres shares her hands-on journey building and evaluating an AI-powered Interview Coach for product teams. She breaks down how she used error analysis, simple code-based and LLM-as-judge evals, and fast feedback loops to improve product quality. Start small, focus on real user errors, and expect to collaborate closely across functions
How to benchmark and boost your brand’s AI visibility. AI-powered recommendations are the new SEO battleground, and if your brand isn’t showing up in ChatGPT or Gemini, you’re basically invisible. This guide walks you through building prompt suites, benchmarking across major LLMs, and using real user queries to spot gaps and outshine competitors. TL;DR: Test, track, and tweak your content or risk losing out to savvier brands
That’s a wrap for this week! 🌟
I’d love to hear your thoughts—what stood out to you, and how are you thinking about integrating these insights into your Product strategy? Reply to the email or drop a comment on Substack to share your take. And if you found this valuable, forward it to a fellow PM, Product enthusiast, startup founder or entrepreneur who’d enjoy the read
More next week! 👋
Angel