DoorDash wants customers to skip its app entirely. On Wednesday, the delivery company announced a new AI agent that takes food orders by text message. It runs inside Apple Messages instead of DoorDash's own interface. For now, people in the U.S. can sign up for a waitlist to try it.
How the agent works
You write what you want in plain language, and the agent turns it into an order. DoorDash's own example is a message like "order my usual." The company says the agent can work out that this means the order a customer normally places on a Friday night, and then act on it.
EliseAI, which builds AI software for two very different customer groups, property managers and healthcare providers, has closed a $350 million funding round. The deal values the company at $4 billion.
Andreessen Horowitz and Bessemer co-led the investment. Ontario Teachers' Pension Plan, Sapphire Ventures and Navitas Capital also took part, according to the company's announcement on September 29.
The money will go toward broadening EliseAI's automation features. The company also plans to hire more engineers, software deployment specialists and salespeople.
From rental leads to repair tickets
EliseAI, formally Elise A.I. Technologies Corp., was founded in 2017. It started out in rental housing, and that market is still the core of its business. The company says its platform now supports the management of more than one in six apartments in the United States.
Meta is pushing back on a report that its AI agent Muse accessed a user's private messages on a Mac without permission. The company says the scenario the journalist described is technically impossible. The journalist says it happened anyway.
The dispute began with a report from Jason Aten, a columnist at Inc. Two Meta executives have since responded publicly. Neither has addressed Aten's explanation of how the access might have occurred, beyond saying it could not have.
What Meta says
Andy Stone, Meta's VP of Communications, answered the report on X. "The Messages integration in the Muse app for Mac is entirely opt-in," he wrote. "You have to enable both Full Disk Access and the Messages connector for Muse to be able to read your Messages content. It can't read your Messages unless you do this."
Google is retiring Gems, its tool for building custom versions of Gemini, and replacing it with "Skills." The new feature is rolling out to Gemini chat users worldwide. With this change, Google joins OpenAI and Anthropic in moving away from personalized chatbots and toward reusable instruction packages that an AI system can call on when needed.
Gems were Google's answer to OpenAI's Custom GPTs. OpenAI is also phasing those out. The format replacing them did not come from Google or OpenAI. Skills started at Anthropic and are now published as an open standard.
What a Skill actually is
A Skill is a detailed prompt written for a specific task. Users can draft one themselves, or have Gemini help write and refine it. The goal is to store instructions you would otherwise retype often, and then call them up on demand.
ElevenLabs, the voice AI company behind some of the most realistic synthetic speech on the market, is now valued at $22 billion. The company has not raised new growth capital to get there. The figure comes from a $300 million tender offer that lets employees sell part of their vested shares to outside investors.
The new number is twice the $11 billion valuation ElevenLabs reached in February, when it raised $500 million. That gap closed in roughly seven months.
What the deal actually is
A tender offer is a structured way for a private company's shareholders, usually staff, to sell existing shares to new buyers. The money goes to the people selling, not into the company's bank account. That makes it different from a funding round, but it still sets a price per share, and therefore an implied valuation.
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