After the Asteroid: The Rise of the AI-Native Animal

One of the unique aspects of venture capital is the opportunity to sit between early-stage founders running very young companies and massive capital allocators (LPs) trying to decide how to best put large (sometimes enormous) pools of capital to work to try to generate a return. The feeling I get sometimes as I navigate these two very different but tightly connected worlds is that my head is above the clouds, trying to see the big theoretical picture, while my feet are firmly on the ground, wading through the muddy mess of early-stage reality.

There is an abundance of data suggesting a bifurcation or “barbelling” of the tech ecosystem. More VC dollars are concentrating into a handful of very large funds and a relative handful of very impressive private companies (Anthropic, OpenAI, and a few dozen more). The anecdotes abound: some late-stage VC funds are rumored to have raised billions and have put the majority of that capital into 4–5 positions. This morning, I saw on Twitter someone trying to trade real estate in the San Francisco suburbs for equity in Anthropic at an $800B+ valuation. It might even be a good trade, but it shows the desperation of nearly every capital provider to get into the same names.

We see this percolating all the way down into the so-called Series A stage and even the so-called Seed stage, where rounds for minimal revenue or, often, pre-revenue companies are taking place regularly at valuations that five years ago could have been Series C/D and ten years ago could have been IPOs.

There are a lot of deep structural and psychological reasons for this dynamic. Structurally, the IPO markets have been shut down through a combination of regulatory overreach and a flood of capital to private equity. This is making it hard to exit to public markets and shielding companies from the cold, heartless scrutiny of sharp-eyed traders and public equity analysts. At the same time, tremendous volumes of fee income on absolutely enormous sums of money deployed into these eternally private giants is heavily incentivizing venture investors to keep the plates spinning as long as they can. Exits would—for the most part—only ruin the party. Psychologically, we’ve all had to listen to tech luminary after tech luminary (forgive me for not naming names) telling us that in five years we’ll all be unemployed, software/SaaS is dead, and that this may be the last chance for any of us to make any money at all before our AI overlords take over. What was supposed to be the finance of innovation seems more like a race for the last few spots on the lifeboats as the Titanic tech industry itself sinks into a sea of foundational models.

Yes, I’m exaggerating, but this is how it feels to a lot of people.

At the same time, I am more excited to be a venture capitalist than ever. In fact, let me be more specific: I am more excited to be a deep-tech, pre-consensus, inception-stage venture capitalist than ever. I think the next few vintages of tech companies—the ones getting started in garages in the Gundo and log cabins in the Nordics (our two latest investments!)—are going to be outstanding. Here’s why:

The key insight for me is the distinction between the inflection giants and the truly AI-native startups being born today. We are indeed living through a huge tectonic shift in technology. We all know this—and we all know why. A few companies are building the foundational tooling and infrastructure that is enabling and powering that revolution. Some of those will generate incredible shareholder value. Others will flame out sooner or later due to flawed economics or poor financing dynamics. The great game of the foundational models and the data centers is the stuff of high finance. These are pseudo-public companies backed by the deepest pockets on the planet. A few may have accidentally raised a small “inception” round, but the vast majority have not. Whether they succeed or fail as individual companies, there are two things to remember. First, even if many of these companies fail to deliver great equity returns, the research investment (models) and infrastructure investment (data centers, GPUs, CPUs) will remain and will power the next several decades of innovation. Models will improve, costs will come down, and the application layer and the end customers will be—as always—the primary long-term beneficiaries of innovation. Second, the unprecedented concentration of attention and capital in a few companies is probably a temporary phenomenon. While I completely buy the arguments about how significant the AI platform shift is, I think this shift is time-bound. After the wave of foundational and infrastructure companies subsides, the true creative explosion of AI-native companies will emerge.

As an early-stage VC, we see the evidence of emerging AI-native companies all day long. Founders are coming to us every day with visions of the future that were impossible a short time ago. They are attacking incumbents with new tools that didn’t exist just a few months prior.

As a VC deploying capital today, we are already investing in companies that were born into the post-AI era. They are AI-native through-and-through. They are moving faster and more aggressively than anything we have ever seen. They are operating in ways that are dramatically more efficient. Development teams are smaller, output is higher, and iteration times are faster. Even company architecture is changing. I think we’ll see more companies getting started in remote log cabins and fewer getting started in traditional accelerators. In addition, many of these companies are raising less capital than we have come to expect. They don’t need it.

The dinosaurs died out because their environment could no longer provide the massive amounts of food they needed to survive. When an asteroid strike blocked the sun and killed the plants at the base of the food chain, these giants simply ran out of fuel for their large bodies.

In the aftermath of this collapse, mammals gradually but steadily took over the world. The first mammals were small, possessing a lean metabolism that allowed them to thrive on niche resources—seeds, insects, and decay—that couldn't sustain a dinosaur's bulk. Their capacity to rapidly iterate and evolve made structural efficiency the definitive advantage for dominating the new era. This is exactly where we are today in technology and startups. The SaaS companies are—like the dinosaurs—suffering their own extinction-level event. Some will survive (alligator SaaS?) but most won’t. A few lucky investors are able to invest in the asteroids themselves (the inflection companies), who are reshaping the world. But the future belongs to the AI-native mammals who will inherit the world that AI has brought about. The massive funds that were build to back the SaaS dinosaurs and now chase asteroids are not evolved to work closely with AI-native founders building at the grassroots of high-risk innovation. These AI-native animals look different. They build differently. They raise less capital, move faster, and operate in strange and emerging pockets of opportunity. The patterns are still emerging. And it's a very exciting time to be alive, to be building, and to be backing the founders of the future.

Gil Dibner

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ENTERPRISE/TECH NEWS

Anthropic's Infrastructure Bet — Anthropic has committed to spending more than $100bn on chips and computing power from Amazon over the next decade, receiving up to 5 gigawatts of new capacity to train and run Claude. The FT reports this comes after a year in which Claude Code's rapid growth exposed real supply constraints — annualised revenue has surged from $9bn at end of 2024 to more than $30bn, and the company has suffered a number of outages. The circularity is worth noting: Anthropic takes investment from Amazon and then turns around and spends it on Amazon's chips.

Coding Consolidation — SpaceX has struck a deal with Cursor to co-develop "the world's best coding and knowledge work AI," with an option to acquire the company for $60 billion later this year, or pay $10 billion for the work done together. The move comes ahead of SpaceX's anticipated IPO and follows its merger with xAI. It also reveals an awkward tension: Cursor currently sells access to Claude and GPT even as both Anthropic and OpenAI build competing coding tools.

HOW TO STARTUP

Still Worth Moving — Ruben Dominguez published a no-BS guide to moving to San Francisco to build a startup that makes a specific case for why geography still matters at the earliest stages. When founders are still shaping product, team, and narrative, proximity shortens the distance between idea and iteration — you meet people faster, test assumptions earlier, and get feedback before it's too late to act on it. The piece is also clear about when the move doesn't pay off: at scale, with a strong existing network, or in categories where geography simply doesn't change access to capital or talent.

HOW TO VENTURE

Consensus Capital — Jason Lemkin at SaaStr crunches the Q1 2026 PitchBook-NVCA data: 73% of all LP capital raised in Q1 went to just five venture firms, and 75% of all VC deal value was invested in just five companies — OpenAI, Anthropic, xAI, Waymo, and Databricks. At the same time, deal count fell 15% quarter-over-quarter to its lowest level since 2016. His conclusion cuts through the noise: being outside the AI mega-round consensus isn't a problem in itself. Not knowing which market you're actually operating in is.

Blue Energy raises $380M to build grid-scale nuclear reactors in shipyards.

Groundcover features on Calcalist’s list of most promising startups in 2026.

Moonshot’s Co-founder & CEO, Hilla Haddad Chmelnik, makes it to ynet Global’s list of The 40 Future Young Voices in 2026, and talks about how defense know-how could help power a civilian space industry.

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