el producto #411 🚀

Service as Software with Agentic AI, Perplexity shopping, Google's Gemini app, Microsoft's Copilot actions, GenAI and customer experience, 2025 Product conferences & more

Hi folks 👋

Happy weekend and welcome to a new edition of el producto

🎰 The week in figures

$5B: xAI has raised $5B at a $45B valuation, almost double its last round just a few months ago

$4B: Anthropic raised $4B more from Amazon, getting a boost to keep competing with OpenAI and other foundation model companies

$75M: Smart ring maker Oura has raised $75M in Series D funding from glucose monitoring giant Dexcom, boosting its valuation to over $5B. The partnership will integrate Dexcom's glucose data with Oura's health metrics, enabling users to track the impact of nutrition on their health, with the first app integration set for 2025

50M: Revolut's Nik Storonsky hinted at a potential US banking license application, after the company passed 50M users and hinted at a target of 100M

$99k: Bitcoin surged past $99,000 for the first time, rallying over 130% year-to-date on optimism that a potential Trump presidency could herald favourable crypto regulations and even a national Bitcoin reserve

94%: Nvidia reported a stellar 94% YoY revenue increase to $35.08B for Q3, surpassing expectations. Despite dominating the AI chip market and gearing up for the high-demand Blackwell GPU launch, analysts warned that “insane” GPU demand has become the baseline expectation, raising concerns about Nvidia’s sustainability at current earnings levels

-25%: TrueLayer, a former fintech unicorn, laid off 25% of its staff in a single day, significantly reducing its workforce

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📰 What’s going on

Google now offers a standalone Gemini app on the app store. Previously it was bundled with the Google app. Availability is currently limited to devices in Australia, India, US, UK and Philippines

Google launches new Gemini AI memory feature for personalized interactions; you can ask Gemini Advanced to remember your interests and preferences for more helpful, relevant responses

The DOJ seeks to force Google to sell its Chrome browser and Android mobile OS businesses to address illegal monopoly concerns

Apple will now be treated like a Bank, says US Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, finalizing a proposal from last year with several changes. The popularity of Apple Pay will now see the Cupertino company regulated by the US CFPB, a watchdog whose role is normally limited to banks and financial services companies

Meta has formed a new AI Product group to build tools for its 200M business users

Instagram is testing out a new feature that will allow users to ‘reset’ the algorithm that powers the content they see. A nice touch for giving power back to users

The new AI powered Alexa is reportedly delayed due to technical problems

Microsoft has unveiled Copilot actions at its Ignite Conference. The agentic AI tool is designed to help users automate recurring tasks they’d rather not complete. Tasks can include automating a summary of meeting actions from Teams meetings, generating weekly reports, answering questions during meetings or conducting meeting prep. Translation capabilities are also on their way - with Microsoft following in the footsteps of other companies by using AI to offer translation capabilities

GitHub also revealed what it described as a “sweeping new agentic future” in the form of GitHub Copilot Workspace. The new product comes with new agents that can perform tasks including brainstorming, spec writing, planning, building and repairing. Each agent specialises in its respective area, with the brainstorming agent focused on generating new ideas, or the repair agents focused on fixing problems. All of this happens directly inside the developer’s IDE

Perplexity rolled out a new AI shopping recommendations feature. This week, the AI-powered search engine debuted a new shopping feature for its paid customers in the U.S. which offers shopping recommendations within Perplexity’s search results as well as the ability to place an order without going to a retailer’s website

A Chinese lab has released a ‘reasoning’ AI model to rival OpenAI’s o1. DeepSeek has released a model that operates along similar lines to o1, and — the company claims — is competitive with the OpenAI product

Stripe launched their pay with crypto product for merchants, accepting stablecoins as payment from other merchants by creating and sending invoices that settle as fiat right into their Stripe balances

Tencent partnered with Visa to launch a pay-by-palm solution in Singapore

Klarna added Google Pay to its big tech partners after an Apple deal

Atlassian has announced a new feature for Confluence called Confluence databases. It looks a little like a native version of Notion or Airtable which is designed to help Product teams avoid repeating information and keeping items in sync. It works by collecting data from apps like Jira and Confluence, which can then be presented in different formats inside a database (as you would do on Notion or Airtable)

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📚 Good reads

How to scale marketplaces. Sharetribe's new blog post gives a clear playbook for early-stage marketplace growth: decide how to scale, choose your next market, create a playbook, and raise funding. More in detail, the piece covers expansion from the initial niche: new geographies, new categories, or new customer segments. The framework emphasizes clarity: a strong Product strategy aligns teams, reduces planning overload, and sharpens decision-making. For founders ready to scale, Sharetribe’s approach offers a practical and strategic guide to growth. a marketplace

Service as Software with agentic AI. This interesting article explores the evolution from single-agent AI tools to orchestrated systems of AI agents working collaboratively in software-driven business operations. The authors—GPs at Foundation Capital—argue that, initially, software served as a workflow tool for digitizing processes but required heavy manual input. LLMs can process diverse data, delivering improved and complex decision-making capabilities with multiple specialized AI agents coordinating seamlessly like human teams. For example, the authors argue that agents can integrate patient intake processes across healthcare systems. At the same time, in enterprise sales, they can handle prospecting, follow-ups, and deal closures in tandem. This marks a transition from AI as an isolated helper to AI as a connected and evolving network

How Stripe built its payment A/B testing product. Stripe recently released a new payment feature which allows merchants to conducts experiments where different payment methods are shown. In this post, the team at Stripe explains how they built it and what lessons they learned along the way

Plaid: stitching together the future of finance. A nice deep-dive into Plaid’s strategy, past successes and upcoming opportunities

How generative AI might impact customer experiences. Ecommerce users say they don’t need, don’t trust, or haven’t encountered generative AI tools. This piece of research by Bain outlines the design principles to consider when using AI in building customer experiences

2025 Product conference list, by Teresa Torres

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That’s all for this week. As usual, feel free to reach out and share your thoughts by replying back to this email or commenting on Substack

Thanks for your support!

Angel