#243 | Defense Tech Opportunities, Verticalized AI Coworkers, & more
Aug 3rd | The latest from Point72, Wing, Menlo, Foundation, Battery Ventures, and others
SandHill.io aggregates and shares the latest investment themes, market insights, and best practices for operating and investing from 700+ VCs, analysts, and operators.
This newsletter curates a selection of posts featured on the website each week.
Investment Themes & Theses
Defense Tech is at an Inflection Point – The Opportunities, Challenges and Innovations Shaping the Sector’s Future (Point72 Ventures)
A new blueprint for fintech: Goodbye human data transfer, hello AI agents as human APIs (Nico Stainfeld & Zach Noorani, Foundation)
Request For Automation: Customs Reporting (Sungjoon Cho, GP @ Fortitude)
The Opportunity in Industrial Tech & Life Science Tools in Europe (Battery Ventures Team)
Industry Developments & Analyses
The Rise of Verticalized AI Coworkers (Tanay Jaipuria, Partner @ Wing VC)
Security for Agents and Agents for Security: The Next Cybersecurity Frontier (Menlo Team)
Why Traditional Identity & Access Management Fails in an Agent-First World (Nancy Wang & Jake Storm, Felicis)
2025 Mid-Year LLM Market Update: Foundation Model Landscape + Economics (Menlo Team)
The Chokepoint in Global Supply Chains that No One Cares About (Annelies Gamble, Partner @ Zetta)
How Big Bank Fees Could Kill Fintech Competition (A16Z Fintech Team)
Will Cell & Gene Therapies Break Insurance? (Vickram Pradhan, VC @ Sopris)
AI Infrastructure’s Second Act: Environments, Evals, Experience (Janelle Teng, VP @ Bessemer)
Guides, Case Studies, and Best Practices for Operating
Building Enduring Companies in the Age of AI (Canapi Ventures)
How to Use AI to Convert More Deals (Mandy Cole, Partner @ Stage 2)
The Subtle Art of Not Faking It for Your Board (Saanya Ojha, Partner @ BCV)
Mastering product-market fit: A detailed playbook for AI founders (Bessemer Team)
What GTM teams are doing with ChatGPT (Kyle Poyar, Partner @ Tremont)
Answering the Four Questions that Matter for Pre-seed and Seed Stage Startups (NextView VC)
How to Build High-Performing Sales & Marketing Teams (Kevin Hamilton, Venture Partner @ Tidemark)
What startups can learn from Anthropic's 80% talent retention rate (Heather Doshay & Nick Lewis, SignalFire)
Additional Reads
Insecurity is the enemy of improvement (Yoni Rechtman, Principal @ Slow)
Timing IPO Windows (Michael Dempsey, GP @ Compound)
The Reframe is the Startup (Mike Maples Jr., GP @ Floodgate)
Fund Math for Dummies (Rex Woodbury, MP @ Daybreak)
QSBS and Early Growth Equity (Morgan Livermore, GP @ Supercruise)
How to think better (and faster) with AI (Parul Singh, Board Partner @ Initialized)
Metro Multiples: A ranking of top startup ecosystems by return on investment (Ascend Team)
The Agentic Enterprise (Jasper Platz, VC @ G2VP)
Why Seed Rounds Are Growing as Startups Shrink (Tomasz Tunguz, MD @ Theory)
The Best Companies Are Dictatorships (Nikunj Kothari, Partner @ FPV)
Your Data, Their Rules (Selina Wang, VC @ Altimeter)
Notes:
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