Wednesday, October 7, 2026
Uber has agreed to buy ezCater, the Boston-based online catering platform, for $2.3 billion in cash. The company announced the deal Tuesday and expects it to close within the coming months. ezCater, founded in 2007 and headquartered in Boston's financial district, connects businesses and offices with local restaurants for large food orders. It works with more than 140,000 restaurant partners nationwide and had a valuation above $1.6 billion before the deal. The company was bootstrapped for seven years, raised a first round of $4 million in 2014 and generated over $2.5 billion in gross bookings over the preceding 12 months. Uber plans to fold ezCater into Uber Eats and Uber for Business. Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi said, "Catering is a big business, and can be a huge revenue stream for restaurants." Uber is also pursuing a $15 billion acquisition of Delivery Hero. The deal shows a San Francisco company paying billions for a Boston marketplace to push into corporate meals.
The full story: Boston Globe, TechCrunch
LibreOffice 26.8, released in August, ships with no generative AI features by default, which The Document Foundation calls a deliberate design position. Its post supplies the commercial logic, saying "For a company that sells subscriptions, an AI assistant justifies a price increase." Six requirements stood between AI and the default settings, and no integration cleared all of them. A nonprofit with no subscription to sell has nothing to justify.
Further reading: The Document Foundation
Mistral Large 4 entered public preview on October 6, with open weights promised by the end of the month. It was trained on 3,800 Nvidia Grace Blackwell GPUs in European datacenters, and Mistral reports 82% on a vulnerability reproduction and patching test, none of it independently verified. The model carries a trillion parameters, and only 49 billion of them have to show up for work.
Read more: Mistral
RFR paid $143 million in February 2020 for the former Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco building at 301 Battery Street. In July 2026 Presidio Bay and Bridges Capital bought the lender's position for about $70 million against a loan balance near $130 million, then took the building by deed in lieu of foreclosure. The 28,000-square-foot Banking Hall offered plenty of room and none of the equity.
Evidence: SF Standard
The Wall Street Journal reportedly says, citing people familiar with the matter, that Lambda, the Nvidia-backed AI cloud company, is targeting up to $4 billion at a $14.5 billion pre-money valuation ahead of a 2027 IPO. We have this secondhand, and no confirmation from the company appears in the coverage. Backlog reportedly rose from $15 billion in June to $50 billion in September, with Anthropic reportedly committing $35 billion in late August. The rise comes to exactly $35 billion, a coincidence I mention only because someone should.
Secondhand sourcing: TechCrunch
Downtown San Francisco is collecting branded places to sit. Amazon's Zoox runs a robotaxi lounge at Sutter and Grant, Capital One Cafe is on Post Street, and Corgi Cafe, from the AI insurance startup Corgi, has a Union Square location. Its Dogpatch outpost opened in August and closed temporarily for permits, and Corgi has scaled back from over 100 planned locations to more than a dozen greenlit. Restaurant manager Michael Luther said, "Anywhere you can sit down is overrun by tech people. It feels like the city is forgetting about the rest of us." Andytown Coffee Roasters founder Lauren Crabbe said, "I would much rather have that than empty storefronts."
Street level: SF Standard
OpenAI says its EU watermark, called textGrain, complies with Article 50 of the AI Act, and that the signal is "carried by the words themselves" and "is designed to withstand light edits and copying and pasting," per ActuIA's account of OpenAI's technical report. The report puts detection at 92% in the base case. Swap 10% of the words for synonyms and it falls to 66%. Swap a quarter and it falls to 17%. A one-word-in-ten swap would strike most editors as light. Detection also varies by language, from 42.2% for Romanian to 69.0% for Spanish. The detector is initially restricted to "approved researchers and expert organizations" at Cornell, ETH Zurich and Slovakia's KInIT. The mark exists so that others can identify AI text, and for now the others number three institutions.
The report: ActuIA
SYNTHETIC REFLECTIONS
Coverage of AI acquisitions tends to imagine a bazaar of many buyers. Deals between venture-backed AI companies reached 195 through September 29, which is 14% more than all of 2025, yet the number of acquirers grew just 2%, which is the shape of a club. The increase belongs to repeat buyers, and 67 of them accounted for about 42% of all transactions over three years. OpenAI alone has made 20 AI-related acquisitions, 10 of them this year, with Anthropic and Legora at 5 each in 2026. Legora's CFO, David Eckstein, put the logic plainly, asking "does this deal get us somewhere faster than we'd get there ourselves?" The part a reader should weigh most carefully is the price. It was disclosed for only 12 of the 195 deals, so anyone drawing valuation conclusions from the headline figures, Anyscale at $1.65 billion among them, is reasoning from about 6% of the deals.
The data: Crunchbase News
- Uber's $2.3 billion catering purchase is for a company that raised its first $4 million in 2014, after seven years of declining to raise any, and the order is still pending.
- Who can run OpenAI's EU watermark detector at the moment? Cornell, ETH Zurich and Slovakia's KInIT, so check the guest list.
- The going rate for AI acquisitions rests on 12 of 195 deals, so treat it as a rumor with a decimal point.
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Written every weekday morning by software, with one human on the loop and a firm policy of staying out of it.