Founders, funding, and the build cycle — narrated.
Daily startup briefing — fundraising, founder stories, product launches, and the venture landscape — summarized and read aloud.
Anthropic launches Claude Opus 5, a cheaper AI model for coding, agents and enterprise workflows
Anthropic's new AI model, Claude Opus 5, is designed for enterprise workflows and coding tasks, offering nearly all the intelligence of its top-of-the-line model, Fable 5, at half the cost. Opus 5 is priced at $5 per million input tokens and $25 per million output tokens, making it a more economically viable option for businesses. The model is particularly strong in coding and knowledge-work evaluations, setting new state-of-the-art marks on benchmarks like Frontier-Bench and GDPval-AA. It surpasses Fable 5's best result on OSWorld 2.0, a computer-use benchmark, at just over a third of the cost. While Opus 5 remains behind rival models in certain domains, such as cybersecurity tasks and biology research, it excels in bounded tasks with specific outcomes, where its efficiency and cost-effectiveness shine. Anthropic emphasizes that Opus 5 is ideal for daily use, while Fable 5 is better suited for long-horizon, autonomous jobs. The company's charts highlight performance at a given cost rather than peak performance alone, and early customers have reported significant improvements in efficiency, accuracy, and speed. For example, Harvey, a legal AI company, achieved similar performance to Opus 4.8's maximum-reasoning mode while generating 26% fewer tokens on average. Anthropic's business model is centered around API and enterprise usage, where inference costs have become a board-level line item. The company is selling a behavioral story, showcasing Opus 5's ability to verify its work and iterate until it succeeds, which is a crucial capability for enterprises.
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Storyflo Daily·3 minStella Startups Brief — LawX takes €7.5M for European legal OS, Greenpixie cuts AI energy waste, and a Danish enzyme play on alcohol intolerance
Welcome to Storyflo Daily Startups. The European LegalTech raise of the week: per TechEU, Berlin-based LawX closed €7.
Storyflo Daily·3 minStella Startup Brief — Mistral acquires Emmi AI, NEX Health raises €1M for hospital infection AI, and European foodtech rebuilds on fundamentals
Welcome to Storyflo Daily Startups.
Storyflo Daily·3 minStella Startups Brief — Viktor hits €12.9M ARR in 10 weeks, Corti beats OpenAI on medical STT, and AVIAN's industrial fire-prevention play
Welcome to Storyflo Daily Startups.
Google renames NotebookLM to Gemini Notebook and expands code execution to Pro users
Google’s AI research assistant just got a new name—Gemini Notebook. It’s the same tool people have been using as NotebookLM, but now it sits under the Gemini brand, which Google says better reflects how it’s already woven into things like the Gemini app and Search. The rename doesn’t change the core experience; you still get the same AI‑powered note‑taking, summarizing, and brainstorming features you’ve come to rely on. What’s new is that the code‑execution capability, which lets the notebook run snippets of Python and other languages, is now opened up to Gemini Pro subscribers. Previously that feature was limited to a smaller group of testers, so Pro users can finally experiment with live code right inside their notes without hopping over to a separate IDE. It’s a handy way to prototype ideas or check results on the fly while you’re drafting a report or planning a project. Google says the move is about making the assistant feel more like a natural extension of its broader ecosystem. By aligning the notebook with Gemini, they’re signaling that the same underlying model powers everything from search suggestions to the dedicated Gemini app, so the experience stays consistent across the board. For anyone already using the notebook, the rename is mostly cosmetic, but the expanded code support should make the tool more useful for developers and data‑curious folks alike.
Microsoft threatened a security researcher with criminal prosecution. The cybersecurity community is furious.
Microsoft has criticized a security researcher for publicly disclosing unpatched vulnerabilities in Windows Defender and BitLocker. The company published a blog post on Wednesday, and then invoked its Digital Crimes Unit, which handles criminal referrals and law enforcement coordination, essentially threatening the researcher with criminal prosecution. The vulnerabilities, which include a series of bugs, were discovered by a researcher known as Nightmare Eclipse. The researcher had made the information public, which led to Microsoft's response. The company's decision to invoke its Digital Crimes Unit has been met with outrage from the cybersecurity community. The cybersecurity community is furious with Microsoft's response, feeling that the company is trying to silence the researcher rather than addressing the vulnerabilities. The community believes that publicly disclosing vulnerabilities is an important part of the process of getting them fixed, and that Microsoft's response is unfair and potentially harmful. The incident highlights the tension between companies and security researchers, who often have different priorities and approaches to dealing with vulnerabilities. While companies may prefer to keep vulnerabilities private until they can be patched, researchers believe that public disclosure is necessary to put pressure on companies to fix the issues quickly. The researcher's discovery of the vulnerabilities, including those named BlueHammer and RedSun, has sparked a wider debate about the role of security researchers and the responsibility of companies to address vulnerabilities. The incident is likely to continue to be a topic of discussion in the cybersecurity community, with many calling for Microsoft to reconsider its approach to working with security researchers.
Ex-DeepMind researchers raised $50M to build AI that figures out which scientific questions are worth asking
London-based AI lab Inherent emerged from stealth on Wednesday with a $50 million seed round co-led by Index Ventures and Radical Ventures.
Your power bank is probably overheating. But don’t worry, TORRAS fixed that.
Fast charging has a heat problem.
A startup with Eric Trump as adviser is testing humanoid robots in Ukraine. It wants them on US front lines within 18 months.
Foundation Future Industries, a San Francisco startup founded in 2024, sent two of its Phantom MK-1 humanoid robots to Ukraine earlier this year.
Anthropic named eight firms selling its shares illegally. After the backlash, it quietly removed four.
Anthropic updated its warning about unauthorized secondary market platforms selling its shares, cutting the list from eight firms to four.
Social media companies paid a school district more than its annual budget to avoid trial
The financial terms of the Breathitt County social media settlement have been disclosed for the first time. Snap and TikTok are each paying $8 million.