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Please join The Information at the New York Stock Exchange on Monday, April 27, to hear from top executives and investors on how the rapid buildout of AI is reshaping tech, finance, and capital markets. Learn more here. Welcome back! This morning we published a list of 15 venture capital partners our sources tell us could be slated to become general partners, or the top decision makers at their firms. One thing that’s clear from the dozens of conversations I had to report on the list: Investors need to be more creative—and move faster—than ever to win deals. Take Yazan El-Baba, a partner at San Francisco-based VC firm Emergence Capital. In 2024, while trying to win a stake for Emergence in a startup looking to raise its Series A, he discovered a shared love of martial arts. “His eyes lit up,” El-Baba recalled. He eventually sealed the deal by practicing Jiu-Jitsu with the founder, whom he declined to name. “Speed matters,” he said. (Read the full story and what happened to last year’s Next General Partners here.) Of course, venture capitalists went to extraordinary lengths to court founders well before AI took over Silicon Valley. But during the last two years, as bigger funds chase AI startups in rounds that can happen just weeks apart from each other, the chase is particularly intense, investors tell me. Some of the investors on our list say they’ve stayed in touch with founders for years before their firm jumps in—or in some cases, before the founders even start their companies. Aashay Sanghvi, a partner at early-stage firm Haystack, told me he met Saronic cofounder and chief technology officer Vibhav Altekar six or so years before his firm invested in the autonomous ship company’s 2024 round, which valued it at $1 billion. While Haystack missed out on the first two rounds, that relationship looks like it’s already returning money on paper: Saronic is raising funds at a $7.5 billion valuation, my colleagues Katie and Cory reported last month. Judging from the contenders for this year’s list, I expect the investor stampede into AI startups to continue next year too. But the pursuit is extending beyond apps and neolabs to those providing the background software and services that make AI run better. This so-called infrastructure layer is where most of the 15 finalists are excited to invest. In fact, the startup with the most common investors among our finalists was Together AI, which rents out Nvidia graphics processing units to AI developers. Lan Jiang at Lux Capital, Mustafa Neemuchwala at New Enterprise Associates, and El-Baba all helped their firms invest in Together. We recently reported that the company is raising at a $7.5 billion valuation, which would notch all these partners a paper return on their investment. Molly Welch, a partner at Radical Ventures is particularly interested in “AI in the physical world companies.” She has worked on Radical’s early investments in AI science startup Periodic Labs and Fei-Fei Li’s 3D model company World Labs, while also leading the firm’s 2025 investment into P-1 AI, a startup making an AI agent for engineers who work on heavy machinery. When asked how she wins deals, Welch put it bluntly: “Get up and work. But I love this job, so it makes it really easy.”
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