The biggest venture financing rounds during 2024 involved AI companies. Reviewing the characteristics of such financing rounds, combined with the performance of our portfolio startups, and our firm’s corporate advisory AI projects (completed and ongoing), I worry that venture investors expect corporate AI adoption will be fast and large-scale. In contrast, corporate AI spending, though growing, is more measured than VCs predict.
The current AI spring is in full swing. Entrepreneurs remain extremely excited about generative AI, as manifested by the number of financing requests our firm and many other investors continue to receive but are starting to think more diligently about where the white space they can go after. Corporations are in testing and evaluation mode as they formulate, or reformulate, AI strategies and assess the impact that generative AI will have on their business. Venture investors remain upbeat about the sector but are also concerned about four issues.
Professor Ikhlaq Sidhu and I recently started talking about how the interest of corporations in the innovations created by startups…
My previous post in the corporate venture capital (CVC) series provided a broad historical perspective on the sector. In this…
In the previous post I introduced a five-dimensional framework to employ while setting up a corporate venture group and discussed…