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Tuesday edition, friends.
This week I kept reading the same story in different clothes: how AI companies leave the building. The Character.AI filing is the loudest version, a unicorn that raised $193M and is now selling pieces to Disney for $20M. The Shoptet deal is the quiet one, and the more useful one for anyone building a small AI team in the region.
If you raised at 2021 prices, read the Airtable story twice. If you are planning a raise this winter, the Firmus IPO tells you what public buyers think of private AI prices. Four stories, five minutes.
Character.AI kept the users, lost the company
On 13 October, Character.AI filed for Chapter 11, with assets and liabilities each between $50M and $100M. Disney pays $20M for some assets plus a non-exclusive, perpetual licence to the technology, and former CEO Karandeep Singh Anand already moved there last month. This is a company that raised over $193M, had 20 million monthly users in 2024, and got $2.7B from Google that year for a model licence and its founders. If no other bidder shows up, the platform is wound down.
The structure is the real news. Apple's EU filing, made public the same weekend, shows it doing the same with Huxe: job offers to some staff and a non-exclusive licence to the IP, with no company bought. The big buyers now take the people and a right to use the code, and leave the shell, the users and the debts behind.
Character.AI users once averaged two hours a day in the app, and it still ended up in court. Put a price on every conversation your product handles before a buyer does that maths for you.
The AI notetaker that gets the hard words right
Your AI is only as good as what you feed it. Feed it a transcript with your product names, acronyms, and numbers spelled wrong, and you spend the afternoon hand-fixing the output.
Wispr Flow Notetaker uses your dictionary and calendar, so product names, acronyms, numbers, and uncommon names come out spelled right. It pops up when your meeting starts and captures Zoom, Google Meet, Teams, and Slack huddles with one click, no bot joining the call.
Then your meetings show up inside Claude or ChatGPT through the built-in connector. No copy paste. Try Notetaker free on Mac and Windows.
A Czech AI bot found its exit in 18 months
Jarabot was founded in early 2025. On 12 October, Shoptet agreed to buy it, its first acquisition since Belgium's Team.blue bought Shoptet last year. Jarabot builds chat, voice and email bots for online shops and says up to 75% of customer questions get answered without a human. Shoptet runs more than 45,000 e-shops and earned 900M CZK last year, up 25%. CzechCrunch puts the price in the low to mid tens of millions of crowns.
That is not a headline number, and it does not need to be. Shoptet gets an automation layer it can sell to tens of thousands of merchants tomorrow. Jarabot gets distribution no seed round could buy. No Series A, no US flip, no two-year fundraising tour.
If you run a small AI agency or product team in CEE, write down the three platforms whose customers you already serve best. Then build the integration they would otherwise have to build themselves, because that is how the Shoptet conversation starts.
Airtable's new owner sharpened the knife
Airtable was valued at $11.7B in December 2021. Milan-based Bending Spoons bought it for a $1.285B enterprise value, about 2.7x its roughly $480M in annual recurring revenue. On 12 October, five weeks after closing, it cut a large part of the team. Nobody has said how many people.
This is the playbook Bending Spoons ran on Evernote and WeTransfer: buy a product that stalled, shrink the team hard, ship faster. For every SaaS company that raised at 2021 prices and never grew into them, this week set the floor. About three times revenue, then the cuts.
The founders who win this cycle never needed the 2021 price. Paris-based Wiremind raised €35M after 12 years of bootstrapping, profitable, with founders keeping control. Same week, opposite ending.
The public market said no to a $5B AI listing
Firmus, an Nvidia-backed Australian AI data-centre operator, was due to start trading on 23 October. It planned to raise more than A$5bn at a valuation of A$30bn to A$44bn. On 9 October it pulled the listing, citing "adverse market conditions", while fund managers pointed to its debt and to capacity that has not been built yet. It will raise money privately instead.
Private AI prices just met public buyers and lost. That matters because the next big test is days away: Anthropic is reported to hold an investor day on 14 October, with a roadshow in November, though its filing is still not public.
Watch the next six weeks closely. A clean Anthropic listing reopens the door for every AI company behind it, and a weak one reprices this year's late-stage rounds. Founders raising now should take the clean offer over the bigger number.
Short Signals
Productivity: Google Workspace MCP gives your agent the whole office. This community server hands any MCP-capable agent 120+ tools across Gmail, Drive, Calendar, Docs, Sheets and Apps Script, with OAuth 2.1 for multiple users. Start with uvx workspace-mcp --tool-tier core and the --read-only flag, so the agent can search and summarise before you let it send anything. (GitHub)
Design: Qwen Image 2.1 Turbo makes 2K images in 8 steps. Alibaba's new open checkpoint runs on your own GPU and also edits images, with presets up to 2752×1536. It is fast enough for mood boards and rough concepts in minutes. It ships under the Qwen Research licence, so read the terms before using it on client work. (Hugging Face)
Marketing: Honeyjar wants to be your PR team. The AI tool finds journalists to pitch, drafts announcements in your voice and spots speaking slots, but a human still presses send. It drew 10,000 waitlist signups in 24 hours and is pitching at TechCrunch Disrupt this week. Join the waitlist now if you launch something before year end. (TechCrunch)
Dev: bigarrow lets Claude Code point at your screen. A tiny macOS tool that draws a big arrow over the exact button your coding agent needs you to click. It cannot click or type, which is the point. Install with brew install franzenzenhofer/tap/bigarrow, then run bigarrow install-skill for Claude Code and Codex. (GitHub)
Dev: GitHub Copilot now fences in its agents for free. Local sandboxing is generally available in Copilot CLI, the Copilot app and VS Code, limiting which files, networks and credentials an agent can reach. The same update lets the CLI's /model command find your local Ollama models. Turn sandboxing on before you give an agent your production keys. (GitHub Changelog)
Next edition soon,
Çelik