TRO | Register now: Leading The "Intelligence Economy"

Plus, Spotify and Apple Join Forces, Anthropic Brings Claude To Small Business, and SpaceX, OpenAI and Anthropic Are Heading For the Public Markets

Author

Meliora Company
May 18, 2026 • Estimated Reading Time: 5 minutes

 Subscribe | 18th May, 2026

In this fast-moving Vertical AI economy, headlines are everywhere but optimism is rare.

Here’s our take on 3 stories that will help you be relentlessly optimistic about the future.

Upcoming Event

In 2026, telcos have hit a wall. After a decade obsessing over The Experience Economy and investing billions in CX, the world has moved on.

We’re now in the Intelligence Economy - The Age of AI.

The question is no longer: can you improve the customer experience?

It’s: can you predict, decide, and act autonomously to grow revenue, reduce churn, and deliver world-class customer outcomes?

In this session, we’ll go beyond the hype of AI and show you the biggest areas of opportunity that the Intelligence Economy has opened up for telcos and how Evergent can help you get there without a massive, risky BSS transformation.

1. Spotify and Apple Join Forces for Video Podcast Distribution

Spotify is adopting Apple's HLS streaming technology, meaning Spotify-hosted shows will soon be able to distribute and monetise video podcasts on Apple Podcasts without changing existing workflows. HLS automatically adjusts video quality in real time based on network speed, reducing buffering and quality drops. Spotify is also opening video distribution to creators using third-party hosting providers including Libsyn, Audioboom, and Podigee. As of November 2025, nearly half a million shows and over 390 million users have streamed a video podcast on Spotify.

Here’s why this matters: Two of the biggest rivals in podcasting are quietly making it easier to work together, and that benefits creators more than anyone. For years, video podcast distribution has required creators to manage separate workflows across platforms, choosing between audiences rather than reaching both. Spotify adopting Apple's streaming standard removes that friction entirely. For the audio industry, the more significant story is what this says about where podcast growth is coming from. Video is now the driver, with 390 million viewers on Spotify alone. The platforms that make video podcasting easiest to produce, distribute, and monetise will attract the best creators - and the audience follows the creators.

2. Anthropic Brings Claude To Small Business

Anthropic has launched Claude for Small Business, a package of connectors and pre-built agentic workflows that puts Claude inside tools small businesses already use - including QuickBooks, PayPal, HubSpot, Canva, DocuSign, Google Workspace, and Microsoft 365. The product ships with 15 ready-to-run workflows across finance, operations, sales, marketing, HR, and customer service, covering tasks from payroll planning and month-end close to invoice chasing and campaign creation. Small businesses represent 44% of US GDP but have lagged larger enterprises in AI adoption.

Here’s why this matters: Anthropic has spent the past year building up the enterprise stack: Claude Code for developers, Cowork for agentic automation, Claude Design for non-technical professionals. This launch points in a different direction: down market, toward the millions of small businesses that have largely been left out of the AI productivity story. The product design is smart. Rather than asking owners to learn a new tool, it embeds Claude inside software they already run their businesses on. The partner roster is essentially the operating system of the modern small business. The diffusion curve for enterprise technology typically takes a decade to reach small business. Anthropic is trying to compress that into a product launch.

3. SpaceX, OpenAI and Anthropic Set To Outstrip Ten Years Of VC Returns

SpaceX, OpenAI, and Anthropic are on track to deliver IPO paydays that outstrip every other start-up exit since 2016 combined. SpaceX is tipped to go public at a valuation of over US$1.5 trillion as soon as June, following its merger with xAI in February. OpenAI and Anthropic are currently valued at US$852 billion and US$380 billion respectively, with Anthropic reportedly in talks to match or exceed OpenAI's valuation in a new fundraise. For context: Uber's 2019 IPO - one of the largest in US history - raised US$8.1 billion on an US$82 billion valuation. That now looks quaint.

Here’s why this matters: The numbers alone are historic, but the more significant story is what these three IPOs would mean for the broader technology investment ecosystem. A decade of venture capital returns, generated across thousands of exits, could be eclipsed by three companies in a single year. That concentration of value creation is without precedent, and it reflects something deeper: the AI wave is not distributing wealth broadly across the start-up ecosystem. It is pooling it at the very top, in the hands of a small number of companies with dominant positions in foundation model infrastructure. For institutional investors, pension funds, and anyone with exposure to public markets, the arrival of SpaceX, OpenAI, and Anthropic as listed companies will be one of the defining financial events of the decade.

Presentations We Love

Twice a year, former a16z partner Benedict Evans produces one of the most widely read macro presentations in technology. His latest, AI Eats the World, cuts through the noise to ask the questions that actually matter: where is AI creating value, where is it destroying it, and what comes next?

Still Curious?

Our Pursuit Of Better

Vapi, the AI voice infrastructure start-up that handles between 1 and 5 million calls daily, has raised a US$50 million Series B at a US$500 million valuation, backed by Peak XV, Kleiner Perkins, Microsoft M12, and Bessemer. Amazon Ring chose Vapi over 40 rivals to route 100% of its inbound calls. Enterprise business has grown 10-fold since early 2025.

Prediction market start-up Kalshi has raised a US$1 billion Series F led by Coatue, valuing it at US$22 billion - double its valuation from just five months ago. Annualised revenue exceeds US$1.5 billion, institutional trading on the platform has grown 800% in six months, and Kalshi now hosts 90% of prediction market activity in the US.

Config, a Seoul and San Jose-based start-up building the data layer for robotic AI, has raised US$27 million in a seed round at a valuation of over US$200 million. Rather than building robots, Config supplies the training data that makes them work - accumulating over 100,000 hours of human motion data, more than 30 times the size of the largest comparable open-source dataset.

The Story of Radio Player

In the early 2000s, the UK radio industry faced an existential threat from streaming. The solution required something unprecedented: getting one of the most competitive industries in the world to work together.

The Pursuit of Better, Together

If this week’s newsletter sparked something, pass it on to a colleague. The best conversations often start with “You’ve got to read this”.