VCs are crowding into the same deals. Here’s who’s pushing back

This article summarizes an episode of TechCrunch’s video series featuring partners from Verdict Capital, Atomico, and Threshold Ventures.

Image credit: Timmy Loen

VC currently suffers from a herd mentality where money chases a few trends. Fast-building startups create a fractured ecosystem where investors crowd into the exact same deals.

That pressure is reshaping how investors operate. Niko Bonatsos, founder and managing director at Verdict Capital, Ben Blume, partner at Atomico, and Andreas Stavropoulos, partner at Threshold Ventures, face this shifting landscape.

To beat the market groupthink, Bonatsos argues that the best seed deals now hide in markets that do not even have a name yet.

Tiny teams are speeding up the startup calendar

New AI tools are altering how businesses are built, bypassing the traditional, staged fundraising calendar.

Today’s founders hit major milestones long before investors can accurately evaluate them. The challenge for venture capitalists now lies in judging companies that achieve massive output with a fraction of the headcount and capital required by older startups.

The breakdown of venture timelines
Before AI tools, the bar was much higher.”You needed 10 people, two rounds of funding, and one whole year of work output. Now [AI tools are] changing how companies are getting started and how they capitalize themselves.”

Team size, burn rates, and funding stages lose their meaning when a two-person operation outpaces heavily funded, legacy competitors. As a result, investors are faced with companies that are chronologically young but operationally mature.

The new startup proves ideas quickly

Modern business building favors speed over scale, forcing the industry to rethink what makes a successful founder.

Ben Blume, partner at Atomico, says the edge goes to founders who can keep pace with constant change. “To succeed in building an AI company, you need an high level of intensity to move at the pace that the market’s moving… and the mental dexterity to do that in a landscape that’s changing all the time.”

Investors face a difficult time underwriting this velocity. Fast growth metrics can obscure the difference between true product-market fit and the false appearance of success, making conviction harder to build at the same moment traditional benchmarks stop being reliable.

Money has narrowed into two lanes

Despite this rapid innovation, capital is not flowing evenly. Money is concentrated around a few specific narratives, leaving the rest of the market underfunded.

Bonatsos says this concentration creates skewed incentives:

Fund size now shapes who wins deals

The seed edge is finding freaks before the market has a name for them