Elad Gil speaks at TechCrunch Disrupt 2025 | Image Credits:Kimberly White for TechCrunch \/ Flickr <\/p>\n
Solo VC investor extraordinaire Elad Gil said on stage at TechCrunch Disrupt<\/a> that AI has been one of the least predictable tech booms he\u2019s ever seen.<\/p>\n Gil is on the cap table of virtually every hit company of the past decade, including many of today\u2019s leading AI companies.<\/p>\n Still, he thinks that over the last year, certain AI markets appear to be nearly sewn up by market leaders. Beyond these areas, a vast swath of AI remains anyone\u2019s game.<\/p>\n \u201cI started investing in generative AI in 2021 \u2026 at the time, not very many people were paying that much attention to it,\u201d Gil said. But he had seen the massive leap in capability between GPT 2, launched in 2019<\/a>, and GPT 3, \u00a0launched in 2021<\/a>. \u201cThe step between 2 and 3 was so large that if you just extrapolated out the scaling laws, or the curve, then you could really assume that this was going to be incredibly important,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n That convinced him to start backing early-stage startups building products powered by large language models. His bets included both foundational model makers like OpenAI and Mistral, as well as application companies like Perplexity, Harvey, Character.ai, Decagon, and Abridge. Yet throughout 2024 and much of 2025, the capabilities of foundational models leaped with every release, upending AI every few months.<\/p>\n \u201cI used to say at the time that AI was the one market where the more I learn, the less I know. Usually, the more you learn about something, the better you know it, the easier you can predict the future, etc. But AI was just hazy. There\u2019s just too much uncertainty. And I think there\u2019s still markets like that in AI,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n However, he\u2019s also now seeing markets with clear winners. The most obvious example is with foundational models themselves. Even though hundreds of models exist, and some countries like South Korea are still working now to develop sovereign models<\/a> by local companies, leaders have emerged. \u201cGoogle, Anthropic, OpenAI, maybe xAI, maybe Meta, maybe Mistral \u2014 it\u2019s like a handful,\u201d he predicts of the winners.<\/p>\n After models, he thinks AI-assisted coding has runaway winners that will make it hard for new entrants to catch up. Not only have the foundational model makers moved in (Anthropic with Claude Code, OpenAI with Codex) but startup leaders like Anysphere\u2019s Cursor<\/a> and Cognition\u2019s Devin (which acquired Windsurf)<\/a> will be hard to beat. And there are well-funded startups like Magic (whom Gil called a possible \u201coutlier\u201d<\/a>) or Poolside on their tails<\/a>.<\/p>\n He sees medical transcription as being cornered, with Abridge a front runner<\/a> and a handful of others like Ambiance<\/a> being \u201cimportant.\u201d<\/p>\n He names customer support \u2013 which was an early target of both traditional AI and the new crop of AI agent startups \u2013 as having hard-to-catch market leaders, such as his portfolio company Decagon<\/a>. (It raised $131 million at a $1.5 billion valuation <\/a>in June.) OpenAI chairman Bret Taylor\u2019s startup, Sierra<\/a>, competes in this space. This is also an area where the incumbents \u2014 Salesforce, Hubspot, and many others \u2014 are adding AI offerings.<\/p>\n So which markets seem wide open? Gil says financial tooling (fintech), accounting, AI security, and \u201cother markets that we know are by default very interesting. We just don\u2019t know who\u2019s going to do it.\u201d<\/p>\n Ironically, fast growth isn\u2019t the signal it once was that a company is going to be a breakout hit. \u201cThe CEOs of every big company are basically telling their teams, hey, we have an edict. We need to figure out our AI strategy,\u201d Gil said. \u201cThese giant enterprises are willing to try things that two years ago they never would have tried, and it\u2019s only because of AI.\u201d<\/p>\n So new AI markets can land a lot of revenue from big-name, enterprise customers quickly, \u201cbut that doesn\u2019t mean they\u2019re going to stick,\u201d Gil points out.<\/p>\n It is only after a market goes through its trial-phase boom cycle that a startup and investors can see if this revenue will stay and grow. \u201cThere\u2019s false signal, and then there\u2019s stuff that is just working,\u201d Gil said. He calls out legal AI startup Harvey as one of the market-leaders that\u2019s \u201cjust working.\u201d It raised three massive rounds in 2025, leaping from a $3 billion valuation to $5 billion<\/a> to $8 billion,<\/a> in just a few months.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Elad Gil speaks at TechCrunch Disrupt 2025 | Image Credits:Kimberly White for TechCrunch \/ Flickr Solo VC investor…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":116597,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[365,363,364,82779,82780,366,82781,220,111,139,69,38907,145],"class_list":{"0":"post-116596","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-artificial-intelligence","10":"tag-artificialintelligence","11":"tag-elad-gil","12":"tag-foundational-models","13":"tag-generative-ai","14":"tag-market-leaders","15":"tag-markets","16":"tag-new-zealand","17":"tag-newzealand","18":"tag-nz","19":"tag-techcrunch","20":"tag-technology"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/116596","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=116596"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/116596\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/116597"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=116596"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=116596"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=116596"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}