Latest Interviews

Merantix, BlueBridge, NEXT AI & Balderton: Moats in the Age of AI Separating Winners from Wannabes

Solène, Nicole, Moody, Max, Breeze, Lina, Bianca

Solène of Baldur Capital moderated a panel with industry leaders from Bluebridge, Mirantics, and Next.ai to dissect the evolving nature of AI competitive advantages as unstructured data becomes automated and model volatility increases. The discussion highlighted that sustainable moats now rely on human engineering, complex legacy system integration, and strong distribution networks rather than proprietary data or static wrappers. Participants emphasized that investor success signals center on team tenacity and founder vision, urging founders to prioritize solving tangible, high-stakes problems over theoretical defensibility strategies.

Kong, Commit, Deepset, Strapi, LiveKit & FINOS: The OSS Paradox Free Software, Priceless Value

Olivier, Russ, Alessandro, Milos, Pierre, Reza Shafi, Gabriel

Four open source founders and an investor discuss strategic monetization models for real-time video, AI frameworks, CMS, and API gateways, focusing on the tension between community health and commercial scaling. The panel contrasts open core and managed service approaches against license changes, arguing that distribution and deployment rather than feature gating are superior mechanisms for generating revenue without alienating users. Key insights emphasize aligning licensing with product type to mitigate cloud provider threats and the importance of investor-founder alignment to preserve long-term community trust.

Softbank, Gen Z VCs, Adagia, F5, Cathay & Samsung NEXT: AI Investment Frenzy The 2001 Remake!

Megan Loyst, Ahmed Getarim, Denis, Chardin Boué, Jonathan Machado, Alok

A diverse panel of investors from GenZBCs, F5, CATA Innovation, Adagia, and Samsung Next, alongside buyer representative Ahmed Getarim, evaluates the current tension between a genuine AI utility revolution and inflated private market valuations. Participants warn of a "hype bubble" where rapid revenue growth in Gen AI clashes with unsustainable unit economics, predicting that 50% of current unicorns will fail while successful ventures rely on proprietary data, vertical integration, and network effects rather than just funding. The group concludes that future viability requires balancing technological acceleration with labor market stability and emphasizes "service as software" as the emerging model for long-term defensibility.

Windsurf, BUZZ HPC, Gnosis, ElevenLabs, Prosus & Bloomberg: The Agentic Economy AI’s Unseen Hand

Rachel Metz, Tim Cowley, Jero, Alex, Matty, Maria Zuber, Matias Niemelaer, Andrzej Baliczak

A diverse panel of industry leaders from BuzzHPC, Prozus, Windsurf, and 11 Labs defined AI agents as autonomous systems requiring multi-modal feedback loops to drive enterprise adoption. Real-world deployments at companies like DHL and Prozus have demonstrated significant operational gains, including 20% faster delivery times and a 1.7 million-hour productivity increase, while OpenAI's $3 billion acquisition of Windsurf validates the technology's strategic value in software engineering. Despite hurdles regarding data disambiguation and regulatory compliance, the panel predicts a shift toward a task-based internet where agents outperform human operators in efficiency and revenue generation.

Balderton, Altimeter, TVG, Coatue, Alpha & Harmonic: Investment in AI Who Gets Funded and Why

Max, Avid, Antoine, Apoorv, Maliki, Bernard

A recent analysis reveals that generative AI revenue is currently dominated by semiconductor giants like NVIDIA, creating an inverted economic pyramid where early startups face massive infrastructure costs and power grid bottlenecks. Venture capital strategies are shifting toward large, high-conviction checks focused on deep infrastructure and energy assets, while successful founders must combine deep domain expertise with technical literacy to navigate complex enterprise adoption. Despite these challenges, high-velocity "AI-first" companies like Higgsfield and Lovable are achieving rapid scale and superior margins by leveraging internal AI efficiency before productizing their services.

A Frieside chat with Rafay & BUZZ HPC: Sovereign AI in Action From Infrastructure to Impact

Rafay, BUZZ HPC, Haseeb, Craig

BuzzHPC positions itself as a sovereign AI provider for Canadian enterprises by operating an integrated stack across Sweden and Canada that delivers over 135,000 GPUs while ensuring strict data residency and compliance with regulations like the U.S. Cloud Act. By transitioning from declining bare metal margins to value-added model-as-a-service offerings, the platform achieves revenue per H100 of $3.50 to $5.00 through self-service consumption, multi-tenancy, and enterprise-grade SLAs. This approach satisfies modern developer expectations by offering granular isolation from single units to 1,000+ GPU clusters, enabling efficient end-to-end project hosting without the friction of data movement between hyperscalers and domestic clouds.

Cohere, Adobe, Teneo: Revolutionizing Enterprise Search with AI. Unlock The Potential of Your Data

Philippe Massoncier, Nick Morales, Abhijit Singh

Adobe and Cohere have formally partnered to integrate Cohere's AI embedding and re-ranking models into Adobe Document Cloud, powering the Acrobat AI Assistant with multilingual and multimodal search capabilities across over 100 languages. This collaboration transforms enterprise search from simple retrieval to intelligent action by unifying fragmented data from systems like Salesforce and SharePoint, while enforcing strict trust pipelines through Retrieval-Augmented Generation to ensure all AI responses are cited to source documents. By offering flexible deployment options including private on-premises infrastructure, the alliance directly addresses critical barriers to enterprise AI adoption such as data silos, security compliance, and the need for context-rich data to enable autonomous AI agents.

Arm, PsiQuantum, Intel, NextSilicon, Lightspeed: Moore’s Law vs AI’s Appetite The Compute Collision

Jean-Anne Philippe, Will Abbey, Elad, Pete Chabot

Intel's Jean-Luc Philippe, ARM's Will Abbey, and experts from Next Silicon and PsiQuantum convened to analyze the shift from traditional transistor scaling toward software-hardware co-design and heterogeneous computing architectures. The discussion highlighted critical advancements in quantum error correction and RISC-V integration while emphasizing that future AI infrastructure requires billions in capital to support hybrid edge-cloud systems and post-quantum cryptography. Industry leaders concluded that the end of Moore's Law necessitates fundamental architectural innovation over brute-force scaling, with a consensus that value is forged through massive, power-intensive supercomputing deployments rather than isolated component optimization.

WEKA, Intel, Graphite, InstaDeep & AWS: Scaling Without Crashing. AI Framework for Enterprise Growth

Eduardo, Mary, Damien, Val, Karim, Murray, Fula Ousmane

The event details the industry shift from experimental AI in 2023 to the scaling of autonomous agents in 2024-2025, driven by urgent economic pressures that are forcing a 75% reduction in cached input pricing. Industry leaders outline a strategic framework prioritizing top-level governance and data transparency to mitigate security risks while navigating a market where compute cost competitiveness will determine the survival of AGI-era businesses. Specific sector applications, ranging from diagnostic health agents to AI-driven code review systems, illustrate how organizations must integrate these tools as central transformation enablers rather than isolated initiatives.

A Fireside Chat with Nicolas Dessaigne (YC-Combinator) & Jean de la Rochebrochard (Kima Ventures)

Nicolas Dessaigne, Jean de la Rochebrochard, Nicolas Tassin

Kima Ventures' Jean de la Rochebrard and Y Combinator partner Nicolas Tassin discussed their investment strategies, emphasizing that AI has shifted from a distinct category to a de facto standard comparable to cloud computing. The investors outlined distinct regional dynamics, noting that US founders leverage superior risk tolerance and speed while European entrepreneurs must overcome cultural humility to access the capital pools required for billion-dollar growth. They concluded that future market leaders will likely emerge in vertical applications within "boring" industries rather than horizontal platforms, provided founders prioritize authentic execution over hype and build defensible data moats.

Lambda, Hugging Face, SemiAnalysis: The Neural Network Is the Computer

The discussion outlines a fundamental shift from traditional programming to "neural software," where generative models act as dynamic interfaces that execute user intent through natural language rather than static code. Key developments in video, audio, and multimodal integration are enabling consistent, real-time content creation while replacing fixed graphical user interfaces with adaptive, semantic environments. This evolution promises to eliminate conventional coding barriers by 2030, though it simultaneously introduces complex challenges regarding state retention and the societal implications of AI-driven interactions.

OVH Cloud, ClickHouse, Neon, Aiven, Airbyte & Commit: Open Software Infrastructure 2.0

Abel, German, Oskari, Heike, Michel, Alexei, Francois Beaufort

Executives from Aiven, Neon, Airbyte, ClickHouse, and OVHcloud converged to discuss how open-source data platforms are securing $10 billion in combined valuations while addressing enterprise needs for data sovereignty and interoperability. The panel detailed how the AI boom is driving a shift from human-led development to agentic provisioning, creating demand for storage-centric architectures that support short-lived, unstructured data workloads. Looking ahead, industry leaders predict a five-year trajectory where hundreds of millions of citizen developers leverage commoditized AI to compress development cycles, necessitating hybrid infrastructure strategies that balance local model execution with scalable cloud data management.

Alix, SAP, Daytona, Feedly, Prosus & Handelsblatt: The Future Agentic AI & Autonomous Workflows

Alix, Edwin Kodabachan, Paul Van der Boor, Alexander Maisor, Emmanuel Casimates, Ivan Bourazin

Experts at a recent industry gathering defined Agentic AI as a shift from simple request-response models to autonomous systems capable of multi-step planning, emphasizing that security and governance remain critical barriers requiring strict human oversight. SAP and other leaders proposed frameworks like "agentic quality controls" and locally hosted environments to manage agent identities and comply with regulations, while anticipating a workforce evolution where humans supervise "digital teammates" rather than performing manual tasks. Despite concerns over the hype cycle, participants agreed that organizations with mature data and processes will soon leverage these tools to exponentially increase productivity, provided they implement robust guardrails to direct this technological capability toward tangible business value.

Fractile AI, Rogo, Scribble VC, San Francisco Compute: The AI Trillion-Dollar Opportunity

Eric Manisse, Elizabeth Weill, Walter Goodwin, John Willett

San Francisco Compute CEO Eric Manisse, Scribble Ventures' Elizabeth Weill, and founders Walter Goodwin and John Willett convened to analyze strategies for scaling AI infrastructure, hardware, and enterprise solutions amidst rapid technological evolution. The panel detailed critical operational frameworks, including balancing hardware development timelines with software agility, mitigating hallucination risks in financial applications, and proactively shaping export control regulations rather than merely complying with them. Experts concluded that long-term success in this sector relies on specialized human expertise for deep tech, the creation of durable data moats, and a shift toward treating global compute as a utility to drive the next industrial revolution.

Data Overload into Actionable Gold: AI’s Rescue Mission for Enterprises Tackling Unstructured Data

Nassime Reyholt, Victoria, Samuel Cohen, Harry Folliter, Robert, Alonzo Garcia

Representatives from Doctolib, Databricks, Alorica, Fergen, and Blackbox AI convened to discuss the critical transition from structured legacy systems to leveraging unstructured data for enterprise decision-making. The panel emphasized that successful AI deployment requires strict governance, real-time evaluation frameworks, and the use of synthetic data to ensure agents can reliably execute tasks without the 80% pilot failure rate common in the industry. By prioritizing data intelligence over model architecture, these leaders outlined a roadmap for moving from experimental playground agents to autonomous systems that self-correct in live production environments.