By building and providing fully integrated solutions that are purpose-built for vertical-specific industries, a new generation of SaaS companies that are AI native have an opportunity to carve out massive market opportunities, building on top of the rapidly evolving horizontal tools offered by big tech, emerging AI platforms for emerging builders and operators, and the open source community. Our colleagues Julia and Daniel expanded on this thesis here and here.

Fundamental changes in technology platforms create massive opportunities for new companies to create platforms that make building, running, managing, securing, and monitoring new applications more accessible. The shift to the cloud created these opportunities, for example, and this will be doubly true in AI. Not only will there be an explosion of new applications to build and manage, but also the underlying tech stack, including models (particularly if fine-tuned and open-source) and model infrastructure (vector stores, knowledge graphs, and more), is increasingly dynamic and complex.

Vertically integrated startups that are providing new, out of the box capabilities to customers. These companies will include both fine-tuned and proprietary models as well as custom Human-AI centric applications to create new opportunities that were not possible only a few years ago.