By Binu Paul
Edition #10. For the longest time, venture capital was driven by the near mystical intuition of star investors – a select, often celebrated club of individuals who could see around corners and spot the next Google or Salesforce before anyone else. That era is fading. The catalyst isn’t a market crash or a bubble. It’s the inexorable rise of AI, triggering an internal reckoning within venture capital itself.
The shift is now in plain sight in Silicon Valley, the crucible of venture capital-led innovation.
At Lightspeed Venture Partners, for instance, the most senior partners, including co-founder Ravi Mhatre, now get involved in every AI pitch. Decisions on deals have moved away from the traditional rainmaker model to multi-partner teams, Mhatre and Bejul Somaia, who leads investments for the firm in India, told the New York Times in December. The internal overhaul has been underway since 2022. With AI investments becoming central to its strategy, it was inevitable and it seems to have resonated with the market. The firm closed out 2025 with a $9 billion-plus warchest spread across six vehicles to double down on AI bets.
Other firms, including Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia Capital and Greylock Partners are using internal AI specialist teams as shared infrastructure for decision-making. Davidos Venture Collective, a more recent entrant, leverages AI agents and a community of 170+ limited partners to source and vet deals.
This behaviour is unusual for venture capital. Historically, thematic shifts from SaaS to fintech to crypto were largely partner-led explorations. Given the uncertainty of AI, across stages and sectors, judgement on deals has become a shared mandate born out of caution.
From mythology to methodology
Pattern recognition – the industry’s traditional edge or shortcut (if you prefer) – is becoming less relevant. In the past, experience allowed investors to map new companies into familiar trajectories: this looked like early Stripe or Salesforce in its formative years. Generative AI has made those patterns widely accessible, and, the process, less dependable.
Founders now arrive with AI-assisted market maps, competitive analyses, and benchmark metrics that closely resemble what venture firms once assembled slowly through years of accumulated knowledge. As that gap has narrowed, more pitches now appear convincing for similar, increasingly standardised reasons, making genuine differentiation harder to spot early. Further, AI has shortened the lifespan of advantage across many sectors. Product differentiation resets faster and what counts as a moat is constantly shifting.
Limited partners are keeping close watch. As familiar ideas of defensibility become less dependable, limited partners are asking more questions about how venture capital firms are making decisions and managing risk. Many are engaging more directly with fund managers to understand how capital is being deployed, how follow-on investments are being paced, and how portfolios are being managed when early signals can change quickly.
Collaborative, AI-informed venture capital
In today’s AI-fueled world, venture capital is becoming less about lone wolf intuition and more about collaborative, data-driven strategies, often straddling continents to plug into global innovation hubs.
That’s exactly the path that Peak XV and Nexus Venture Partners have taken. Like Lightspeed, the two India-born venture capital firms have reoriented their playbooks, stepping directly into the Silicon Valley dealmaking arena.
No longer tethered to Sequoia Capital’s US mothership, Peak XV has recalibrated its strategy to embed itself in Silicon Valley’s AI ecosystem. It now has a full-fledged office in San Francisco with the express purpose of capturing AI opportunities at source, including investing as a limited partner in funds. It’s also, reportedly, beefing up its capital arsenal. The Economic Times reported in April last year that the firm is raising a new $1.2-1.4 billion fund, its first since it separated from Sequoia.
Nexus has always operated with a cross-border mandate and that’s proving useful as it doubles down on AI from its new fund, $700 million raised last year. According to reports, while the firm continues to pursue opportunities in India, a sizable part of the new fund will be deployed in AI startups in the US, even those that don’t have an India connection.
While Nexus and Peak XV represent investors at the relatively mature end of the deal table, what’s happening at the seed and earlier stages is also interesting. In 2025, the Antler India and Asia Pacific teams collaborated to help US market focused AI startups from the region to evolve more effective got–to-market strategies. The programme takes selected founders to Silicon Valley where they work closely with experienced operators and entrepreneurs.
“What we created Embark for was to solve GTM, not fundraising, because if you can get traction in the US, capital is not an issue. We want to create the best experience for you to land in the US very quickly and find traction. Even for strong firms, in the past, it’s taken 12 to 18 months. We want to compress that three to six months,” Antler India partner Nitin Sharma told The Runway in the Unscripted podcast.
Scroll down for the full episode.
An operating system for consistency
The AI surge has often been compared to the late nineties Internet boom, which was instrumental in transforming how we live and work for decades. Experts believe AI will have a far more pervasive influence on our being. In venture capital, it’s chipping away at the mystique that built around the asset class and replacing that with a humbler reality – repeatable processes, team-based decisions and continuous learning.
None of this is to say that instinct, intuition and individual brilliance have no place. But given the enormity of the opportunity – over $200 billion was poured into AI in 2025 (source: Crunchbase) – and the challenges, relying on ‘gut feeling’ as the primary operating system is now redundant.
Recent developments at firms such as Lightspeed, Peak XV and Antler are examples of the industry letting go of some of its old self-image. It is becoming less romantic and more deliberate, placing more emphasis on consistency than on individual brilliance.
How long this holds is still unclear. But the old way is already under strain.
Binu Paul is a former business journalist with bylines in VCCircle, Livemint and Business Today. He’s spent years tracking startups, private capital, and strategy up close and now helps founders structure deals and raise capital at SlydS.
The views expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not represent the views of The Runway, its editors, or any organisation the author is affiliated with. This article is intended for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice. The author may have direct or indirect interests in companies or sectors discussed.
Unscripted
Antler’s Nitin Sharma on Day-Zero Investing
In the latest episode of Unscripted, Antler India partner Nitin Sharma tells us why investing in startups before ideas have even properly formed has become a mission over the past five-odd years, creating market access for Indian AI founders in the US, growing up in the India of the nineties and the values he imbibed, and how his investing approach has evolved over the last decade.
Sharma started in venture capital with NEA in the US. He returned to India co-build Lightbox before moving out to invest as a solo GP with First Principles, backing companies such as Fynd, Third Wave and Kutumb. Around 2020, he teamed up with Urban Company co-founder Rajiv Srivatsa to bring Antler to India.
Have a compelling story to share on Unscripted? Write in to us and we’ll make it happen.
Recco | Notes on Culture, Craft, and the Considered Life
Sharp, Not Showy: Japanese-style Knives from Kerala
Whether you love to cook or barely step into the kitchen, a well-forged knife is a thing of beauty. Like any well-made object, it is as satisfying to simply own as it is to use. It is also one of those rare objects that works just as well as a personal acquisition as it does as a thoughtful gift, particularly for a senior professional, mentor or boss who enjoys cooking.
The Japanese make the world’s best kitchen knives. Japan, in fact, has knives designed for almost every task imaginable, from slicing fish to breaking down meat. The challenge, of course, is access. Most of us don’t travel to Japan often enough to walk into a knife shop in Sakai or Seki.
Which is where Urukk comes in.
Made near Kochi by Jesudas Pudumana, Urukk knives take clear cues from Japanese blade design while using locally sourced steel. The work also sits against India’s own steelmaking past, particularly wootz steel, developed in the south and later used to make the legendary Damascus swords.
Jesudas produces a focused range of Japanese-style knives. These include gyuto (an all-purpose chef’s knife), santoku (shorter and flatter, suited to everyday prep), and, among others, nakiri (a straight-edged vegetable knife). His patrons include some of India’s best-known chefs, along with serious home cooks and collectors.
Check them out here.
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