W
welcome to the MinRegion Exchange, a weekly newsletter for startups and markets. It is inspired by the daily MinRegion+ column from which it takes its name. Do you want it in your inbox every Saturday? Register here.
Generative AI is not just about creative endeavors and parlor tricks. Both investors and Big Tech are betting that it will also affect corporate infrastructure and cybersecurity, and they are putting money on their mouths. — Anna
Developer tools plus generative AI
Y Combinator Demo Days are a strong indicator of the trends investors may be interested in – which is one of the main reasons MinRegion always keeps a close eye on them. In the Winter 2023 batch, three areas stood out, the accelerator said: “open source, dev tools, and AI.”
Dev-tools startups in that batch drew particularly strong interest from investors, with four of them raising additional funding just weeks after Demo Day, Insider reported. AI-related startups, on the other hand, were very popular with founders, representing 34% of the winter cohort.
While these areas can be viewed individually, I’m more interested in how they might overlap, so I called Israeli VC Rona Segev to see what she had to say – not just because Israel has positioned itself as a hotspot for developer tools, but also because almost half of its portfolio is related to AI in some way.
Segev, the co-founder and managing partner of VC firm TLV Partners, thinks generative AI could lead to innovative ways for companies to explore and manage their infrastructure.