> Zero LLM evaluation, observability, or tooling companies in the Series-A data.
This makes sense. The entire engineering/tooling field is so gonna change. Picking a winner makes isn't really possible. Most people are just starting to solve real problems with it and starting to build patterns that are not complete nonesense. But it will still change a lot
> “AI for X” verticals are surprisingly narrow.
I think that makes sense too. Those were a significant part of the initial hype. A lot of people promising that they'll take a "generic" LLM (which you all have seen how already smart that is) but now train it specifically on parenting, or trivia, or your emails, or your help center. It's a service type that will continue to exist. Perhaps it needs to tailor to a specific enterprise scenarios to gain traction as a startup. Though the need for these companies to manage the privacy concerns of the customers with their ability to inspect and look at the data and clean it might not be fully solved yet.
> Reducto - Reducto is an AI-driven API that specializes in converting unstructured documents like PDFs and images into structured data.
This is an example of the type of companies where "extracting LLM relevant context from X" and are relevant for any company doing the "AI for X" schtick or enterprise doing AI development on their own. This company is specifically about PDF and images, but we probably gonna see others that are for videos, archives, isos, msoffice docs, and even the ultimate holy grail of "universal binary => very rich structured data" API.
> Developer Tools & Infrastructure
The picks in this category are the most perplexing to me.
This makes sense. The entire engineering/tooling field is so gonna change. Picking a winner makes isn't really possible. Most people are just starting to solve real problems with it and starting to build patterns that are not complete nonesense. But it will still change a lot
> “AI for X” verticals are surprisingly narrow.
I think that makes sense too. Those were a significant part of the initial hype. A lot of people promising that they'll take a "generic" LLM (which you all have seen how already smart that is) but now train it specifically on parenting, or trivia, or your emails, or your help center. It's a service type that will continue to exist. Perhaps it needs to tailor to a specific enterprise scenarios to gain traction as a startup. Though the need for these companies to manage the privacy concerns of the customers with their ability to inspect and look at the data and clean it might not be fully solved yet.
> Reducto - Reducto is an AI-driven API that specializes in converting unstructured documents like PDFs and images into structured data.
This is an example of the type of companies where "extracting LLM relevant context from X" and are relevant for any company doing the "AI for X" schtick or enterprise doing AI development on their own. This company is specifically about PDF and images, but we probably gonna see others that are for videos, archives, isos, msoffice docs, and even the ultimate holy grail of "universal binary => very rich structured data" API.
> Developer Tools & Infrastructure
The picks in this category are the most perplexing to me.