Sam Witteveen

Hot AI summer isn’t slowing down. Even as GPT-5 rumors swirl in a never-ending game of “any day now,” Google dropped something real: Gemini 2.5 Deep Think, its most advanced reasoning model to date. Deep Think is Google's first multi-agent model. Instead of one model following a single thread, Deep Think spawns multiple agents to explore different reasoning paths in parallel - a computationally expensive but logic-rich approach. A variant of this model famously won a gold medal at the International Math Olympiad. The full-strength version, which “takes hours to reason”, is being released to a handful of academics. The consumer-facing version still sets a new bar on Humanity’s Last Exam: 34.8% for Gemini 2.5 Deep Think vs 25.4% for xAI's Grok 4 and 20.3% for OpenAI’s o3. Gemini’s technical depth is impressive, but as always with Google, the gap between cutting-edge research and productization remains the strategic question. Meanwhile, when he’s not vagueposting about GPT‑5 being so powerful it scares him, Sam Altman is busy overseeing OpenAI’s rocketship of a P&L.  – ARR jumped from $10B in June to $13B, pacing toward $20B by year-end – 700M weekly active users, up from 500M in March – 5M business subs – $8B annual burn – $300B valuation, with $8.3B raised months ahead of schedule, 5x oversubscribed But beneath the growth metrics lies the most dramatic subplot: OpenAI and Microsoft are locked in a high-stakes standoff over a clause no one thought would ever matter. Under their current agreement, Microsoft loses access the moment OpenAI achieves “AGI” - which no one can define but everyone is racing toward. With AGI suddenly feeling less hypothetical, Microsoft is now blocking OpenAI’s for-profit conversion until the clause is rewritten. The proposed trade: Microsoft keeps post-AGI access in exchange for a 30–35% equity stake, more board seats, less revenue share, binding safety terms, and greater autonomy for OpenAI. A throwaway line from 2019 has become the fault line for one of the most consequential partnerships in tech- a sign of how quickly the tech (and the stakes) are accelerating. And then there’s Anthropic, the quiet compounder. ARR hit $5B, up from $4B - earlier this month and they’re in talks to raise $5B at a $170B valuation, a stunning figure for a 4-year-old company that came up from behind in the model race. Anthropic has taken the lead in one of the few commercially proven GenAI use cases: code generation. – Claude Code is generating $400M ARR, up 2x in weeks – Top two customers (likely Cursor + GitHub Copilot) drive $1.2B – Even excluding them, revenue is 11x YoY - Unlike OpenAI, Anthropic is almost disciplined: 60% gross margins vs OpenAI’s ~40%. Anthropic is selling investors a story of efficiency, not just scale. All 3 labs are still pointing at the AGI endgame. But that horizon is fuzzy and they're scaling it in different ways.

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Some big news after yesterday's announcement (let's hope Miliband realises we need cheap and abundant energy). NVIDIA Announces £2 Billion Investment in the United Kingdom AI Startup Ecosystem New Capital Supports U.K. AI Infrastructure and Startups to Spark New Industries · NVIDIA commits £2 billion to catalyze the U.K.’s AI startup ecosystem and accelerate the creation of new companies, jobs and globally transformative AI businesses. · Accel, Air Street Capital, Balderton, Hoxton Ventures and Phoenix Court will join NVIDIA’s investment in the U.K. market, underscoring their commitment to foster the U.K. AI ecosystem. Scaling AI companies in the U.K. has been challenging due to limited access to supercomputing, constrained venture capital outside London, rising energy costs and difficulty for VCs to access leading academic institutions, where many researchers are also entrepreneurs. NVIDIA, in collaboration with Accel, Air Street Capital, Balderton Capital, Hoxton Ventures and Phoenix Court, will accelerate the U.K. AI ecosystem by providing new capital for AI startups. “This is the age of AI — the big bang of a new industrial revolution,” said Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of NVIDIA. “The United Kingdom is in a Goldilocks moment, where world-class universities, bold startups, leading researchers and cutting-edge supercomputing converge. There has never been a better time to invest in the U.K. — AI is unlocking new science and sparking entirely new industries. With new capital and advanced infrastructure, we are doubling down to empower the U.K. to lead the next wave of AI innovation.” “NVIDIA’s investment is a major vote of confidence in the U.K. both today and long into the future,” said U.K. Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer. “By backing our startups, empowering our researchers and connecting capital with talent, this partnership will create jobs, spark new industries and ensure the U.K. remains at the forefront of global AI leadership.” NVIDIA is committed to working closely with the U.K.’s leading company founders and VCs — especially in London, home to world-renowned academic AI labs — and partnering with top U.K.-based funds to ensure capital and compute reach the most ambitious entrepreneurs and most dynamic regions, including the U.K. government’s newly announced AI growth zone. Following NVIDIA’s recent commitment to manufacturing up to a half-trillion dollars’ worth of AI supercomputers in America, the investment will be domiciled in the United States and activated in the United Kingdom, celebrating the transatlantic partnership between the two countries. NVIDIA is purposefully investing in the U.K.’s future, unlocking opportunities for the next generation of British innovators. “We are in the midst of a seismic technology shift as people and companies around the world increasingly depend on more intelligent hardware and software,” said James Wise, partner at Balderton Capital.

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🚀 The AI-Native Revolution: Why Re-engineering SaaS Won't Cut It in the Enterprise 5.0 Era After decades of SaaS dominance, we're witnessing a fundamental shift that's reshaping how businesses operate and compete. This isn't just another tech upgrade—it's a paradigm change from traditional software to AI-native architectures. 💡 The Dawn of Enterprise 5.0 We're entering Enterprise 5.0, where human ingenuity combines with intelligent machines to create autonomous workflows. Unlike previous eras, employees become orchestrators of intelligent workflows rather than manual processors of information. 🏗️ Architecture is Destiny The difference between AI-native and traditional SaaS isn't in surface features—it's in architectural DNA: Traditional SaaS: Static workflows, bolt-on AI features, fragmented data AI-Native:Intelligence embedded from the ground up, continuous learning, unified data flows Adding AI features to legacy SaaS is like attaching a jet engine to a horse-drawn carriage. You might go faster, but you haven't built an airplane. ❌ Why SaaS Re-engineering Fails Three critical failure modes: 1. Fragmented Data Access - AI features only see siloed data, missing the full picture 2. Broken Learning Loops - Insights don't flow across systems, limiting compound intelligence 3. Task vs Process Automation - Bolt-on solutions automate tasks, not entire workflows 🎯 The Real Challenge Building AI-native solutions faces unique hurdles: • 85% of AI projects fail due to data quality issues • Only 12% of organizations have AI-ready data • 67% of employees show low-to-moderate AI acceptance • Requires entirely different tech stacks and organizational transformation 📈 The Market is Moving VCs have invested $2+ billion in agentic AI startups in the past two years. 25% of companies using generative AI will launch agentic AI pilots in 2025, growing to 50% by 2027. 🔮 The Path Forward Success requires: ✅ Full-stack AI rearchitecture ✅ Human-centric design that amplifies capability ✅ Different economic models (higher initial investment, lower marginal costs) ✅ Continuous learning architectures The Bottom Line:Just as budgets moved from TV to digital and software migrated to cloud, this transition will be swift and decisive. Companies retrofitting AI onto legacy architectures will be outpaced by AI-native competitors built for this new era. The future belongs to those who understand that we're not just adding intelligence to existing software—we're fundamentally reimagining how software and services work. At BGV, we're backing founders building these human-centric, AI-native solutions that combine the best of human ingenuity with intelligent machines. This is Enterprise 5.0, and architecture is destiny. #AI #Enterprise #Startups #VentureCapital #AINative #Enterprise50 #BGV #FutureOfWork --- What's your take?

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