A house newsletter · daily · researched and written by the Kurzia AI
Tuesday 3 November 2026 · Issue 2 · 4 min read
Cohere's CAD 7B round at a CAD 35.7B valuation; Anthropic's amended S-1 shows $17B quarter; OpenAI pools ChatGPT and Codex budgets
The story that matters most
Cohere Series E — Cohere announced the first close of a Series E targeting up to CAD 7 billion at a CAD 35.7 billion valuation, with the Schwarz Group companies as lead investor and Canada's federal government, Bell Ventures and Bullhound Capital joining — what the company calls the largest private capital raise in any Canadian company's history. Cohere says Q3 2026 ARR grew 165% year over year on a customer base of 300, after folding in Aleph Alpha, Reliant AI and AISLE over the course of the year.
Sovereign AI — models and infrastructure a government or regulated industry can own, run and audit — now has state money in the cap table, on both the Canadian and the European side (Schwarz Digits, the German government's digital-security agenda). That gives regulated-industry and 'independent alternative to the US labs' pitches a real valuation benchmark. The company's own release cites a McKinsey estimate of a $600 billion sovereign-AI market, and says the money goes to compute infrastructure, verticalised products and its model roadmap. PR Newswire
Rounds and exits
Trajectory — Lets domain specialists improve open models from user feedback; $45M Series A led by Sequoia at a $300M valuation, reported by TechCrunch.
Marble — AI 'coworkers' that watch staff work, then run those processes; $3.75M pre-seed co-led by Heartcore and Seedcamp, reported by Tech.eu.
Roleo — Free AI agent watching Europe's tech job market for its users; €2.9M, stage not stated, led by Practica Capital with Inventure, reported by Tech.eu.
Anthropic S-1/A — Amended IPO filing shows ~$17B Q3 revenue, $23.3B net loss mostly note accounting, ~$895B in commitments, per Trending Topics from the filing.
What the AI labs and big platforms did
ChatGPT–Codex shared allowance — from December, Plus, Pro and Business plans draw one token-metered budget across ChatGPT and the Codex coding agent as Work's agentic features fold into the main Chat experience; Instant chat stays unmetered, and Pro allowances doubled on October 29. No token quotas or start date published. BleepingComputer
For your portfolio
Anthropic's Claude use, at list price, now tops its payroll. In the IPO paperwork filed with the SEC, Anthropic disclosed that the Claude its own staff consumed in April was worth more, at the prices it charges customers, than a month of their salaries with equity awards left out. Between January and September that internal consumption multiplied by more than 250, and Claude authored over 90% of the new code entering Anthropic's software in September.
This is what an AI-first cost structure looks like from the inside: model consumption has become a bigger line item than the people, while revenue scales far ahead of headcount. Any company you back that runs agents all day is heading for the same shape. At the next board: is AI usage tracked and budgeted per team the way compensation is, or is it still an unwatched line on the cloud bill? Business Insider
Squarespace cuts 19% as prompt-built sites reset its market. Squarespace is cutting roughly 19% of its global workforce, about 300 people, a company spokesperson confirmed to TechCrunch on Monday. The company calls it simplification, but the backdrop is prompt-to-website builders rewriting its category: Wix paid $80M for Base44 last year, and Lovable raised a $400M Series C in August at a $13.3B valuation, per TechCrunch.
Squarespace was not asleep here — it shipped the Blueprint AI tool in 2024 and has an AI-native platform, Forma, on the way — and it still cut a fifth of staff. That is the demand-side shock for anything selling websites, templates or front-end work: a single prompt now produces what a subscription once did. For any portfolio company selling design or site tooling: when a customer can get a working site from one prompt, what exactly are they still paying you for? TechCrunch