Here are the types of AI companies enterprise VCs want to back in 2025

The AI ​​startup market is broad, from companies that want to develop new chips, to those that use AI to build robots, to others that want to use AI to create specialized solutions for industry-specific workflows. There are many potential areas for venture capitalists to invest in, but there are clearly some sub-sectors that they are more excited about than others.

TechCrunch recently Survey 20 VCs who invest in startups looking to sell to enterprises on their predictions for 2025.

Mark Rostick, a vice president and senior managing director at Intel Capital, told TechCrunch that now that the big foundational models are established — at least in his opinion — the next interesting area of ​​investment is AI solutions for specific tasks.

“I find models that are particularly intriguing in certain functions, especially when combined with agents built on top of them,” Rostic said. “As AI adoption accelerates, application-centric organizations will take center stage, as CEOs increasingly look for ways to leverage AI in specific areas that deliver real, transformative impact.”

Mike Hayes, managing director of Insight Partners, echoed this sentiment. He added that he would support companies building products that use AI to reduce business friction.

“I look for solutions that solve unique, orthogonal challenges for enterprises—areas where traditional solutions have fallen short,” says Hayes. “This includes re-imagining vertical and person-specific workflows with GenAI or agentic automation and security innovations that not only detect and alert, but also remediate.”

VCs interested in going after companies that target specific enterprise use cases need to make sure that these startup solutions are actually companies, as opposed to just features. Otherwise, we could see a repeat of the SaaS boom in 2021, when many companies that were really just one-note features raised amounts of venture capital earlier. Being left behind Enterprise budgets in 2023 will favor companies offering platform solutions while contracting.

Of course there are tasks that are important enough to warrant a single-feature solution. As for SaaS, we overwhelmingly hear that enterprises will still pay for companies that offer specific cybersecurity solutions. As for AI, it’s not yet clear which point solutions enterprises will be willing to pay for. Ed Sim, founder and general partner of Boldstart Ventures, recognizes this challenge.

“The trick is to skate where the puck will be and that’s a feature, or a product, or a business,” says Sim.

Another area that VCs are excited about is reliability and resilience. Jason Mendel, an investor at Battery Ventures, said he’s looking to invest in companies in the observability and reliability space. Leeran Greenberg, co-founder and managing partner of Team8, also has an eye on what he calls “enterprise resilience.”

“The Crowdstrike software update incident showed how fragile our digital world is, not only because of cyber attackers, but also because of mistakes,” Greenberg said. “We need a more resilient, anti-fragile digital infrastructure by design.”

AI infrastructure will remain a hot area of ​​investment in 2025. The VC noted that with advances in AI agents, they are looking at the infrastructure required for enterprises to adopt the technology in addition to companies that can help drive pricing for AI agents. .

“It’s still very early innings here, and I believe the AI ​​infrastructure momentum will continue through 2025, especially due to the proliferation of agentic frameworks, the development of new model paradigms (including logic), edge AI advancements, and UI/UX development of AI applications ( (including computer use),” said Janelle Teng, vice president of Bessemer Venture Partners.