“I woke up today and Claude killed my startup.” That’s how Irina Bodnar opened a viral post on X, describing how a new feature from Anthropic’s Claude dramatically disrupted her AI startup, Ryze AI. The post quickly gained traction, surpassing 4.2 million views in just two days.
Ryze AI builds an autonomous advertising agent. The product integrates directly with ad accounts on platforms such as Google and Meta, automatically managing campaigns, adjusting budgets, fixing errors, and optimizing performance without human intervention.
According to Bodnar’s LinkedIn, she and her co-founders launched Ryze AI in 2025. Within two months, the startup had secured several hundred paying customers and was scaling rapidly. “We were growing like crazy,” she wrote.
Then came the shift.
Similar functionality began appearing inside Claude and inside Manus, an AI product later acquired by Meta. Bodnar says that a single feature release changed everything:
“One Claude/Manus feature, and our deal close rate dropped from 70% to 20%. Claude basically made our entire product category obsolete.”
While she acknowledges that the functionality is not yet as strong as Ryze AI’s, she believes it’s only a matter of months before the gap closes.
The Bigger Fear for AI Startups
Bodnar’s story highlights one of the core fears facing AI founders: that platform giants like Anthropic or OpenAI will launch competing features, instantly compressing entire startup categories.
In fast-moving sectors like AI-powered advertising, where capabilities evolve rapidly, the distance between startup innovation and platform integration can be dangerously small. When core functionality becomes embedded directly inside large AI systems, distribution advantages and ecosystem control often outweigh feature differentiation.
Pivoting Instead of Folding
Rather than shutting down, Ryze AI is pivoting.
Bodnar says the team anticipated this possibility weeks earlier and had already begun preparing a strategic shift. The company will now focus on internal workflow automation for large advertising agencies. In addition, it plans to offer AI-powered advertising agency services tailored to small and medium-sized businesses.
The broader question remains: as AI giants expand horizontally into adjacent markets, how many narrowly focused AI startups will be forced to reposition or disappear entirely?
For Bodnar, the answer isn’t retreat. It’s adaptation.
