Gemini 3.0 Launches, Anthropic Strikes New Deals, Cloudflare Crashes Globally, and a Startup Splits the Atom
This Week in Startup Newsletter 11/18/2025
Gemini 3.0 officially launched with major upgrades: significantly improved reasoning surpassing LMArena, true multimodal intelligence, stronger agentic abilities, enhanced “vibe coding,” and a new deep think mode. Fresh benchmarks place it ahead of Anthropic’s Claude Sonnet 4.5 and GPT-5.1. More here.
Anthropic formed new partnerships with Nvidia and Microsoft. Claude is now available on Azure, making it the only frontier model deployed across all three major cloud providers: AWS, GCP, and Azure. Nvidia and Microsoft are also committing up to $10 billion and $5 billion in investment, respectively. More here.
Cloudflare experienced a global outage that temporarily took down major services including Spotify, ChatGPT, and X. The incident follows an AWS outage that disrupted large parts of the internet last month. Cloudflare reported seeing a surge of unusual traffic to one of its services, which triggered the crash. More here & here.
Physical Intelligence demonstrated its two-armed robot performing a wide range of tasks, from building and labeling boxes to making coffee and folding laundry, using a Visual-Language-Action model combined with reinforcement learning. Their training process follows three stages: providing demonstrations, refining behavior through corrective coaching, and allowing the robot to improve autonomously through its own experience. More here & videos here.
ElevenLabs released Image and Video, a new suite that lets you generate images, videos, voices, music, and sound effects using leading models like Veo, Sora, Kling, Wan, and Seedance. They also unveiled Studio, which gives you timeline-level control to fine-tune content, add music and SFX, and layer in voices. More here.
Intuit signed a $100M deal with OpenAI to bring TurboTax, Credit Karma, QuickBooks, and Mailchimp directly into ChatGPT. This follows OpenAI’s October launch of third-party app support, opening the door for companies like Intuit to embed their services natively inside the platform. More here.
Databricks is reportedly in talks to raise additional capital at a higher valuation, just a few months after its Series J round in August. The new funding would boost the company’s valuation from roughly $100 billion to about $130 billion. More here.
The Berlin-based Generative Engine Optimization startup Peec AI raised a $21 million Series A, valuing the company at over $100 million. Peec AI helps companies understand how their brands appear in AI-powered searches by tracking visibility, rankings, sources, and sentiment. More here.
Lambda raised a $1.5 billion Series E to expand its GPU capacity and develop fully owned data centers to meet soaring demand for AI infrastructure. The funding also accelerates Lambda’s move toward vertical integration by shifting from rented facilities to designing and operating its own. More here.
Valar Atomics became the first startup in history to split the atom, marking a major milestone for private-sector nuclear innovation. Through Project Nova, the team achieved zero-power criticality of the Nova Core at 11:45 AM in partnership with Los Alamos NCERC and the Nevada National Security Site, generating key data to advance their Ward250 reactor program. More here.
Shopping with Gemini has been upgraded before the holidays. You are now able to ask questions like “I’m looking for kitchen gift ideas for my sister who loves to host dinner parties… My budget is $100,” and Gemini will give you a chat style response with links and images to recommended items and those sites. More here.