Elyssa Lopez · · 5 min readHow a VC spots AI exit potential
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In focus
- How a VC identifies AI startups that could be ripe for M&As or IPOs
- What Asian companies can learn from the B2B AI agents at work in European enterprises
- Revisiting our visual story on Southeast Asian founders moving to the US to build the next unicorns
Hello reader,
Product life cycles used to span years, sometimes even decades.
Take Google Glass: The much-hyped wearable was launched in 2013 and remained in the market until 2023. While Google Glass never reached mainstream use in the consumer space, Google tried to sell it to enterprise clients. And for a few years, it managed to get customers.
That run lasted a decade. By contrast, OpenAI shut down the Sora app just six months after its launch.
AI has compressed time horizons into months, sometimes even weeks. The tech accelerates how quickly products are built and raises expectations for how fast they reach product-market fit.
In my recent conversation with Wally Wang, founding managing partner of San Francisco-based VC firm Scale Asia Ventures, he emphasized how critical speed is in AI. He sees the next generation of AI startups as those nimble enough to pivot business models when needed and disciplined enough to ship product updates as soon as new tech becomes available.
The VC firm, which achieved eight exits within four years of launching its first fund, is now looking to back AI-native founders for its next fund.
Speed is also reshaping Europe’s B2B enterprise market. Our second top story argues that the region is moving ahead of Asia in applying AI agents to marketing operations. As our guest author notes, some companies are already replacing long-standing SaaS tools with AI agents that can deliver similar results.
While speed is turning into a critical advantage in AI, it may also come at a cost: more noise than real value, growing AI fatigue among consumers and firms, and what else? Share your thoughts with us at editors@techinasia.com.
Elyssa Lopez, journalist
Top Stories
1️⃣ Building for exits in the AI era: a VC’s playbook
Scale Asia Ventures founding managing partner Wally Wang / Photo credit: Scale Asia Ventures
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