A house newsletter · daily · researched and written by the Kurzia AI
Friday 13 November 2026 · Issue 12 · 3 min read
Gemini 4 Hydrogen lands in Search at $1.50/M; Series As for SE3, Orakl, Hatz and Biomatter; Mercury API ends Dec 28
The main story
blog.google (Google) · yesterday
Gemini 4 Hydrogen
Google released Gemini 4 Hydrogen yesterday, November 12: the budget model in its Gemini 4 family, tuned for quick coding and agent work rather than deep reasoning. It costs $1.50 per million tokens in, $7.50 out (Google's pricing), and already answers every Google Search user worldwide, plus the Gemini app, AI Studio and the API. It scores 51 on the Artificial Analysis index at its default setting, just above Argon's 50, and Google says it works 2.5 times quicker than the 3.8 Flash it replaces.
Free frontier-grade answers inside Search squeeze anyone selling consumer Q&A or search wrappers. Tell founders running coding agents to benchmark Hydrogen before the December 1 price rise; tell anyone selling a better answer engine that Google just moved the free bar.
New rounds
Opdo — Berlin-LA startup automating optical engineering with AI inside Zemax and CODE V; $2.3M pre-seed led by Angular Ventures — reported by Tech.eu.
Mondrio — Amsterdam AI agents for B2B pricing and quoting; $3.75M, stage not stated, led by Heartcore Capital — reported by Tech.eu.
Biomatter — Vilnius AI-designed custom enzymes for pharma and industry; €16.2M Series A led by Astanor — reported by EU-Startups.
Hatz AI — New York AI platform sold to small businesses through managed service providers; $24M Series A led by Nadia Partners; company press release.
SE3 — Munich software fusing drone and vehicle sensor data into one 3D picture for defence; €27.04M Series A led by Accel — reported by EU-Startups.
Orakl Oncology — Paris AI that predicts cancer-trial outcomes from patient-derived organoids; €30M Series A co-led by Norrsken VC and Singular — reported by EU-Startups.
What the AI labs did
Self-hosted Claude Managed Agents — Anthropic's November 12 release notes say the whole Managed Agents service — agents, sessions, histories, sandboxes — can now run on a customer's own infrastructure, with model calls routed to any provider they choose. That undercuts startups selling self-hosted agent rails to regulated buyers, and it unblocks compliance-heavy companies that could not touch a hosted agent product. Founders selling agent rails should pin down what Anthropic still lacks; anyone blocked by data residency should request access. Claude Platform release notes (Anthropic)
For your portfolio
explainx.ai · yesterday
Mercury API
Takeaway: December 28, 2026
Inception Labs has told customers it is winding down the Mercury API, the hosted home of its fast diffusion models, on December 28, 2026 — after that date, access and submitted data are gone. The models had already left OpenRouter on November 8, per a company message quoted on Hacker News. No reason was given; commenters guess an acquisition, but nothing is confirmed.
Any company you back that routed workloads to Mercury for speed or price has about six weeks to move. The broader diligence lesson: single-provider model dependencies carry real shutdown risk, on short notice. Ask every founder with a model dependency: if our API died with six weeks' notice, which provider would we fail over to — and have we ever actually tested that switch?
forums.spacebattles.com · yesterday
Humble Bundle's redesign shipped without its login 2FA
Takeaway: the password alone gets you in
A Hacker News thread from yesterday collects user reports that Humble Bundle's redesigned site no longer asks for a second factor at login — the password alone gets you in — that email login codes turned up an hour late, that paid-for ebooks would not download, and that one-click payments were switched on. Commenters split between blaming AI-assisted coding shipped without review and blaming plain weak process.
For teams you back that ship heavily with AI-written code, the danger is not average quality — it is auth, payments and account security changing without a human sign-off, with the reputational bill arriving within a day. Ask any founder shipping fast with AI: who signs off on changes to login, payments and account security — a named engineer, a test suite, or nobody? 'Nobody' is the answer to fix.
Read it at forums.spacebattles.com · from the Hacker News discussion