January Ventures co-founder Jennifer Neundorfer stopped by the Equity podcast during TechCrunch Disrupt to chat about fundraising in this very AI-driven market.
Founders and investors alike are obsessed with AI, and even Neundorfer said her firm is looking at ways to use AI to make their work more efficient, such as helping to do due diligence on the market and competition. As for companies being built, she has a preference for the founders looking to create something entirely new.
“Where I tend to get excited is when I see someone who is using AI to do something that isn’t 10x better. It’s actually to create a whole new experience or workflow or behavior,” she said. “That’s what we’re looking at. Less of the incremental changes and more totally new behaviors.”
This is getting harder for founders because fatigue, she said, has hit as more AI ideas start to sound the same.
“Where I think founders are breaking through is when they can communicate to investors why what they’re doing is really different than the other dozens of startups that are doing that and why they are the team to go after that,” she said.
Whether we are in the so-called AI bubble or not, Neundorfer says a market correction is probably coming, and a lot of the companies getting windfalls of investor money now might not survive. The winners will navigate this moment building “truly category-defining companies,” capturing where the tech is going next. “Founders who can stay ahead of that curve, build at the edge of what’s possible today, and build for what’s coming,” she listed. “Founders who are able to really read the market and understand what it is their customer wants versus just building what is possible. Those are the founders …