A house newsletter · daily · researched and written by the Kurzia AI
Thursday 5 November 2026 · Issue 4 · 4 min read
Meta buys coding-agent Conductor and shuts its cloud Nov 20; six rounds led by a16z, Battery and Capital One; Uber counted four agent-booked rides
The main story
Conductor · yesterday
Conductor
Takeaway: shuts down on 20 November
Meta has bought Conductor, the app that runs several coding agents in parallel on one software project, founder Charlie Holtz announced on 4 November. New sign-ups stopped the same day, Conductor Cloud goes read-only on 13 November, and it shuts down on 20 November, when deletion of user data begins; active subscribers get a refund. The local Mac app keeps getting new models and critical fixes until early 2027.
The detail that matters to an angel: the agents were never Conductor's own, TechCrunch notes they came from Anthropic and OpenAI, so Meta bought interface and talent, not models. Big platforms are buying thin wrappers cheap and keeping the model layer to themselves. Any coding-agent deal you look at now needs something a lab cannot rebuild in a quarter. Ask a founder in that space to name, in one sentence, what they own that Meta's next acquisition cannot.
“We have never sold or trained on Conductor user data, and we still won't.”
New rounds
Lazzaro One — Berlin maritime software that explains why a vessel behaves oddly, including sanctions-evading shadow fleets — pre-seed; six figures; led by B#, the pre-seed fund of IBB Ventures; reported by Tech.eu.
Phaze — Remote desktop giving people and AI agents full control of powerful machines, from the founders of Parsec — seed; $8.75 million; led by a16z.
Shackleton AI — AI agents running bidding, scheduling and paperwork for construction projects — seed; $5 million; led by Battery Ventures.
Aformic — Warehouse robots that carry up to 2,000 lbs and the Qursor fleet platform, an AIUT spinout — seed; $6.95 million; led by Veteran Ventures Capital.
Supa — AI automating UK residential block management, buying local firms and taking their admin off their desks — seed; £21 million; equity co-led by 2150 and OpenOcean; reported by Tech.eu.
Sentra — Data security governing what AI agents can reach, founded in New York and Tel Aviv — $150 million; led by Capital One Ventures; a strategic investment per the release, a Series C per SecurityWeek.
What the AI labs did
Kimi K3.1 Pro — Moonshot AI put out open weights on 4 November for its most capable model: 2.8 trillion parameters total, with 104 billion active per token, reading text and images, and a one-million-token context window. A model this strong that anyone can self-host squeezes resellers of hosted frontier models and opens cheap, private inference to product builders. The weights run on vLLM and SGLang, and Moonshot serves the same model over its own API — founders on lab API contracts should benchmark it on their own workload before renewing. Hugging Face
For your portfolio
SaaStr · yesterday
Ramp AI Index
Takeaway: $9,873 per employee per month
Ramp's index, built on card transactions from more than 85,000 US businesses, shows the top 1% of AI spenders peaked in July at $9,873 per employee per month and had not recovered by September, per SaaStr's analysis on 4 November. Jason Lemkin ties the same plateau to Anthropic's amended S-1: a $5.4B revenue add in Q3 against $6.8B in Q2.
Ramp has reported that 1% of firms drive 80% of spend on OpenAI and Anthropic, so when the whales stop expanding, growth stalls no matter how many new logos sign — and most B2B AI companies share that shape. Ask each founder to rank customers by monthly spend and compare the top 1%'s September total with July; if it is flat while the customer count grows, revenue rests on a few accounts that have stopped expanding.
“Any adverse change in demand from our largest customers…could adversely affect our business and prospects.”
TechCrunch · yesterday
Uber's agent-placed orders: four rides
Takeaway: four rides
On its Q3 earnings call on 4 November, Uber said only four rides were booked through an AI agent in its busiest week of October, and around 500 Uber Eats orders out of roughly 320 million trips and orders that week, TechCrunch reports. DoorDash has said it has seen only a few hundred agent-placed orders in total.
Two of the biggest consumer marketplaces now have dated public counts, and agent-driven transactions are a rounding error — a reality check for any round whose model assumes agents buying on behalf of consumers. Ask founders pitching agentic commerce for their own transaction counts with dates; Uber's CEO notes booking a ride in the app takes 50 seconds, which is the bar an agent has to beat.
“It is very, very early and very limited traction that we are seeing so far”