Even before 2026 began, the sentiment around AI models and there fast paced development was similar all over the globe – it is coming for white-collar jobs. And now, the concern has manifested to an extent. In a recent development, San Francisco based startup Ryze’s founder, Ira Bodner, said that Anthropic’s Claude AI has killed her business overnight. This happened because Anthropic and Manus dropped new features that compete with the core product offered by Ryze, a tool designed to manage Meta and Google ads.
In an article written by Bodnar on X, she threw light on the fact that Ryze has acquired several hundred clients in just a couple of months with a 70 percent deal close rate. Now, after the Claude update dropped, the close rate at Ryze came down to 20 percent from 70 percent.
She said, ‘I woke up today, and Claude killed my startup. We got several hundred paying clients in 2 months, it was growing like crazy. One Claude/Manus feature and our close rate dropped from 70% to 20%. Claude just made our entire product category obsolete.’
She further said, ‘We built an AI agent that automates ad management for you. Like, you can give it access to all your Google and Meta accounts, and it will manage them for you. Pretty cool. Customers loved it. Claude and Manus both released connectors for Meta Ads. Claude still can’t make changes in ad accounts — it can only do analysis, and it has no access to Google Ads. But give it a few months, and it will. So building here feels pointless.’
What’s a little relieving here is that Bodnar and her team already predicted that something like this could happen anytime soon, hence, they began with a pivot a few weeks ago. On a concluding note, she said, ‘Our current business will be fine anyway. We knew what was coming and started actively pivoting a few weeks ago.’