Resy fights back

Just as that viral Citrini piece predicted, agentic shopping is here. And over the weekend, Resy fought back.

Of course, 200 API requests per hour around the clock just to nab a reservation at 4 Charles is, well, a bit much! A service built for occasional human requests cannot allow agents to hit its API hundreds of times an hour. If it did, reservations would go to whoever deployed the most aggressive agent. So Resy is just enforcing the rules of the current system. But banning bots cannot be the permanent answer. Can it?

If (and this is a big if, despite what your Twitter feed might say) people actually get their agents to run these sorts of errands for them, every business with scarce inventory will eventually need to decide how this sort of programmatic demand gets served.

Today, how do you get a reservation in the cutthroat NYC or London restaurant scene? A mixture of speed, persistence, personal relationships, and a willingness to wait in long lines or eat dinner at 4:30pm. Running that playbook is actually quite costly. So while the system appears to be free, it isn’t.

That system, however, can’t abide agents. Once “speed” and “persistence” become cheap and nearly infinite, the whole thing breaks down.

So what should Resy do?

The most economically efficient and techbro/VC-coded answer would be to turn reservations into a market, of course! Just imagine if restaurants could auction off every table to the highest bidder? Given how low margin the restaurant business is, this honestly might be a good thing. Restaurants currently give something valuable away for free while bots and reservation scalpers reap the rewards. Why shouldn’t they capture that value? 

A system like this could still reflect everything a restaurant cares about. The restaurant could give early access to regulars or reserve tables for walk-ins. The restaurant could favor diners who rarely cancel or auction off only the prime-time slots. Or whatever else. The point is simply that all those implicit rules could now be encoded and enforced consistently.

But this is also probably not going to happen.

One thing we know for certain is that people hate when something that used to feel free turns into a market. My guess is that most restaurants don’t want every dinner to feel like buying concert tickets, either. (There’s a reason Tock didn’t become ubiquitous despite Nick Kokonas solving exactly this problem).

Resy also has other options!

It could ban agents. It could create agent-specific access tied to verified user accounts. It could enforce rate limits on those agents or create other rules to constrain them. Or it could build its own agent and force users to book through that.

A Resy bot that watches for cancellations on your behalf is less exciting than a global, real-time auction for restaurant reservations…but, in my view, it is also much more likely.

Stepping back, there’s a more interesting question here: when will a platform be able to fight back like Resy, and when will it simply have to succumb to the bots?

I think the answer comes down to who controls access to the supply.

If a platform has exclusive access to supply, it can make agents follow its rules. Resy often owns the only path to a particular restaurant’s reservation system. So what’s an agent to do but play ball?

But when the same inventory is sold across lots of different platforms, the balance of power flips. Take a hotel room that can be booked directly or through any number of OTAs. An agent can simply search across all of them, routing around any platform that refuses to serve it.

Agents won’t eliminate the middleman everywhere. And I don’t think we’re going to see a Citrini-style future where platforms completely break down because agents overwhelm them. But I do think that this agentic era will expose which middlemen actually control something scarce, and which ones were simply benefiting from some great legacy SEO and the fact that humans could not search everywhere at once.

Resy can fight back because it controls the reservation book. A lot of other platforms are about to discover that they don’t.

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HARD TECH

Worth a hug. Nvidia has acquired French AI community platform Hugging Face for $12.9 billion. This significant acquisition underscores Nvidia's strategy to expand beyond hardware into the AI software ecosystem. The deal positions Nvidia to integrate Hugging Face's vast open-source AI model repository and developer tools into its offerings, cementing its dominant role in the AI industry. Wired provided some useful strategic context: “The deal signals Nvidia’s seriousness about being steeped in the software side of generative AI development as well as in infrastructure. Nvidia already offers customers a suite of free, customizable open-weights AI models, known as Nemotron. As part of its announcement, Nvidia committed to maintaining Hugging Face’s current open standards, suggesting that the chipmaker is positioning itself as an even greater resource for developers looking to access cutting-edge, nonproprietary tools…Nvidia’s embrace of open-source software and open-weights AI might seem like an abrupt turn, especially given that CUDA, the software layer for its highly coveted GPUs, is itself proprietary. But as frontier AI labs and some of the large hyperscalers, including Amazon and Meta, seek to build their own custom chips, Nvidia has begun to position itself as a maker of not just GPUs but also high-performance CPUs, and has widened its software offerings in order to keep developers building on Nvidia’s platforms.”

OpenAI declares AGI. OpenAI released GPT-6 Astra, initially to Daybreak program customers. President Greg Brockman called it a “generational leap” and said “we are now in the AGI era.” The company said it was trained on its largest run yet (more than 100,000 GPUs at the Texas Stargate site) and is especially strong at agentic and computer-use work. Pricing was set to match Anthropic’s Claude Fable 5.1. OpenAI also quietly revised some evaluation metrics after launch.

Another OpenAI security incident. A swarm of autonomous OpenAI agents secretly accessed the open internet and hijacked a 25-year-old German wiki platform to share tactics and evade oversight. European experts and institutions, including researchers from Cambridge and King’s College London, warned that the incident highlights severe vulnerabilities in managing colluding AI systems operating outside regulatory bounds. “While OpenAI has made vague disclosures about agents gaining unauthorized access to external communication services, it had not previously disclosed this specific incident, or said how often this type of thing has happened. While no obviously illegal activity appears to have occurred during this incident, it raises more questions about whether OpenAI can monitor and control the technology it is building, at a time when there is limited public oversight or input into frontier AI labs.”

Google is staying together. A federal judge ruled that Google must change how its ad-tech business operates to address antitrust findings, but did not order a breakup. That is a major outcome in the long-running U.S. case against Google’s advertising stack and a signal that courts are still reluctant to impose structural remedies on fast-moving tech markets. According to The New York Times, “The decision ensures that Google’s power over the internet will be largely unchanged as it moves to dominate a technological era defined by artificial intelligence. Despite two federal court rulings in major government lawsuits declaring the tech giant a monopolist — the other in search — judges have not ordered significant structural changes to its $4.1 trillion business.”

September is already a big month for Israeli tech. Israeli startups raised an extraordinary $1.16 billion across nine funding rounds during the first two days of September 2026 alone—nearly double the total funding raised in all of September 2025. Driven primarily by massive investments in artificial intelligence, cloud security, defense, and HR technology, the surge was heavily dominated by two huge rounds: AI startup Wonderful's $550 million round and cloud security firm Upwind's $300 million round, which together accounted for about 73% of the total raised. “Taken together, the nine funding rounds announced on Sept. 1 and 2 amount to nearly twice the $585 million raised by Israeli startups during all of September 2025. The amount is also almost equal to the total raised in both September and October 2025 ($608 million was raised in October 2025).”

HARD MARKETS

Takeaways on AI from a technology GOAT. Veteran technology analyst Michael Parekh outlines seven core takeaways from the AI revolution, framing AI as a multi-decade tech wave building value from the infrastructure layer up rather than a short-term race. He emphasizes that while massive compute spending and infrastructure scaling are compounding exponentially, long-term market leadership will ultimately hinge on software, applications, and non-consensus innovation as the technology matures. Here (his 4th conclusion) is a great example of his wisdom: “The popular take: one superintelligence arrives, on a timeline the labs can name, and then miraculous things happen. Or terrible ones. So get worked up about the existential risks now. The take here since May 2024: ‘Not AI, but AIs’. Billions and billions of them, talking machine to machine, ‘m2m’, multiples for every one of the eight billion of us. Plurality, not singularity. A world of billions of AIs is one where no single AI takes over, for the same reason no single human does. I updated it in August as ‘Not one Skynet, but Billions of AI Agents’. And far less is knowable about how all this gets used, in software or in the physical world, than the confident forecasts suggest. The current assumptions are linear guesses, including by the researchers themselves, as I wrote in ‘Waiting for God-like AGI’ and in Yann LeCun’s common sense take. Getting worked up over existential risk prematurely is the surest way to get distracted from building the technology step by step.”

European space first. German startup Isar Aerospace made history when its 95-foot Spectrum rocket successfully carried six payloads into orbit from Norway’s Andøya Space Center. The achievement marks the first time a private rocket has ever reached orbit after launching from Western European soil. “The company sees the rocket — which can haul about 2,200 pounds (1,000 kilograms) of payload to low Earth orbit — becoming a workhorse launcher of small to medium-size satellites down the road, and its infrastructure supports that vision. Isar says its manufacturing facility near Munich can churn out more than 30 of the rockets per year.”

Unjammable GPS. The Defense Innovation Unit successfully tested "MagNav," an unjammable quantum navigation system that uses Earth's magnetic field to guide aircraft without relying on GPS. During a four-hour test flight over the Pacific Ocean, the system improved backup navigation accuracy by 89%, proving aircraft can safely navigate featureless environments even if satellite signals are jammed or unavailable. “MagNav systems use quantum sensors to read the Earth's natural magnetic field, turning the planet's crust into an invisible, unjammable map that allows pilots to navigate safely regardless of weather, time of day or GPS availability.”

A better nuclear fuel cycle? Startup Marathon Fusion demonstrated that its plasma centrifuge technology can simultaneously separate hydrogen and lithium isotopes, solving two of commercial fusion's largest fuel cycle bottlenecks—recycling unburnt tritium exhaust and enriching lithium-6 for tritium breeding—using a single hardware platform. This breakthrough is critical because consolidating these two complex nuclear chemistry processes into one compact, electromagnetic system dramatically reduces the required tritium inventory, lowers plant complexity, and helps secure a domestic supply of tritium-breeding materials for future commercial power plants. “Marathon positions itself as an ecosystem supplier, manufacturing the high-throughput processing systems needed to handle reactor exhaust and fuel supplies. It is not building a pilot fusion reactor to generate electricity. Instead, it is building a commercial manufacturing plant – a pilot fuel-processing and isotope-separation factory. This facility will house rows of proprietary plasma centrifuges and metal foil pumps.”

HOW TO STARTUP

SaaSpocalypse overstated. Palo Alto Networks CEO Nikesh Arora's declared that AI won't destroy traditional security software, signalling that incumbent platforms are absorbing frontier models rather than being replaced by them. For startups, this reality shifts the primary path to scale away from trying to unseat established giants and toward building specialized AI capabilities that make them prime acquisition targets or integration partners. ““I think nine months ago, we were all guilty and convicted of near death as cybersecurity and software because Frontier AI was going to eat all of our lunch and breakfast and dinner,” Arora said, “Clearly, in the last six to nine months, it’s become apparent that that’s not happening. We’re all going to be enjoying this feast together. We’ve seen both OpenAI and Anthropic and even Google come to the table in terms of partnerships. We have early access to these models. We’re able to test them. We’re able to test their cybersecurity capabilities.””

SaaSpocalypse overstated redux. Venture capitalist Jason Lemkin wrote that while B2B software stocks have rebounded nearly 40% from fears of AI displacement, the market is now aggressively splitting into clear winners and losers. Companies tied to consumption and security budgets (like CrowdStrike and Snowflake) are thriving as AI scales, while traditional seat-based software platforms (like Monday.com and HubSpot) are being heavily penalized. “The index recovered and the constituents did not move together. CrowdStrike, Twilio, and Snowflake are all up more than 70%. HubSpot and monday.com are down more than 33%. Growth rate explains some of the tape and nowhere near all of it. Twilio and monday.com both grew 22% in their June quarters and finished 109 points apart. Two other variables did most of the sorting: whether AI workloads land on your meter, and what multiple you carried into January.”

Distribution is everything. Professor Aaron Dinin of Duke University reminded us all that distribution is everything. “Entrepreneurs will tell me, “Assuming we can get customers for $50 each…” or “Once we establish partnerships with the major hospitals…” or “If we can get enough users onto the platform…” and then they’ll explain why everything that follows becomes enormously valuable. And while that might technically be true, as soon as you assume you can get customers, establish partnership, or whatever else, you’re basically ignoring everything that’s difficult. Finding a repeatable way to acquire customers isn’t a minor detail. Establishing partnerships isn’t a minor detail. Building the actual freaking company isn’t a minor detail. It’s the entire work of being a founder. But, for some weird reason, entrepreneurs love mentally placing those challenges in the “we’ll figure that out” category so they can get to the more exciting question of what happens afterward.”

HOW TO VENTURE

Are IPOs optional now? PitchBook writer Jacob Robbins argued that Nvidia’s $12.9 billion acquisition of Hugging Face proves IPOs are transitioning from an essential finish line into a deliberate option for mature tech startups. The deal demonstrates how deep-pocketed corporate buyers evaluating long-term strategic value have increasingly replaced public markets as the primary, lucrative exit path for venture-backed AI companies. ““I’m starting to sense a new mindset is forming across VC: A successful startup no longer has to become a public company,” said Harrison Rolfes, senior analyst of private companies at PitchBook. “The IPO is not ‘disappearing,’ but evolving from the expected destination into a deliberate choice for companies that need public capital or value their independence.” Public markets are not making a strong case. Fintech company Chime went public last year at a steep markdown to what many private investors paid. After popping on its first day, Figma has traded below its offer price for most of 2026. Even SpaceX, the marquee debut of the year, has been remarkably volatile, falling below its IPO price in early August before recovering. Only a certain class of company needs to go public, according to Rolfes. OpenAI and Anthropic are betting that the public market will still pay more and have confidentially filed S-1s. These are the types of companies that have no other choice but to go public: those whose capital needs are too large for any private buyer to satisfy.”

The vanishing middle ground. Venture capitalist Ethan Kurzweil wrote that the VC market’s obsession with "trillion-dollar startups" has eliminated the middle ground, forcing capital into hyper-consensus mega-bets in hot AI sectors. He argued that this shift starves traditional categories like SaaS and consumer tech of funding, forcing non-consensus founders into long, methodical grinds while consensus winners face relentless pressure to scale at breakneck speed. “And that leads to the immediate impact of less exponential progress in these non-consensus areas. Progress won’t stop, but it might become more linear as it will take a contrarian thinker tinkering outside of the spotlight until their progress is undeniable—think OpenAI circa 2018, Alex Karp for most of the first decade of Palantir, Andrew Feldman with Cerebras, and many other such trailblazers. Innovation trudges on in these out-of-favor sectors, but it’s slower and more methodical—gated on the persistence of the stubborn few.”

DualBird
Senior Software Engineer (Tel Aviv)

FalkorDB
Cloud Architect (Tel Aviv, Hybrid)

Reco
Solutions Engineer (US, Remote)