Jaden Schaefer

What I think is interesting is investors have poured billions of dollars into AI for the last few years.

This isn't a trend that is slowing down.

And I think all of this technology really has played a huge role in Silicon Valley's basically their priorities and a lot of what comes out of the global tech industry.

I think even in a market right now that is obviously very obsessed with AI.

I mean, if you if you look at every basically every single company that is raising money now is no longer just a SaaS.

It's like an AI company.

And so I think while every company has kind of added AI to their sales, like their pitch deck, basically for VCs, I think it's becoming a lot more selective on who's actually getting money, right?

You can't just put AI on your pitch deck and get money.

So according to one of the first interviews or kind of data points I got on what VCs are looking at as far as investing in AI companies today that maybe they weren't in the past is from Aaron Holiday.

He's a managing partner at 645 Ventures.

And by the way, TechCrunch did a whole rundown where they interviewed a bunch of different people.

I'm grabbing some quotes there and also grabbing some data from the overall industry that we're tying together in kind of this episode in this report.

But Aaron Holliday, he's a managing partner at 645 Ventures.

And he says that the category is still getting the most interest are AI native infrastructure.

So that's vertical SaaS built on proprietary data.

systems of action that actually complete tasks and platforms embedded deeply into mission critical workflows.

So basically, in other words, products that own something really essential.

And there's a keyword I think he said in here that I 100% agree with.

And that is, he said, AI that actually completes something.

So, I think there's a lot of this, a lot of these startups that were like, hey, look, we have like a SaaS, we have a tool, and then we stuck ChatGPT on top of it.