W
elcome to the Tech Zone Daily Exchange, a weekly startups-and-markets newsletter. It’s inspired by the daily Tech Zone Daily+ column where it gets its name. Want it in your inbox every Saturday? Sign up here.
Generative AI isn’t just about creative endeavors and parlor tricks. Investors and Big Tech alike are betting that it will also affect enterprise infrastructure and cybersecurity, and they are putting money where their mouth is. — Anna
Dev tools plus generative AI
Y Combinator Demo Days are a strong indicator of the trends investors might be interested in — and that’s one of the main reasons why Tech Zone Daily always watches them pretty closely. In its 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 among 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 looked at separately, I’m more interested in how they might overlap, so I called up Israeli VC Rona Segev to see what she had to say — not only because Israel has positioned itself as a hotspot for dev tools, but also because almost half of her portfolio involves AI in some form.
Segev, the co-founder and managing partner of VC firm TLV Partners, thinks that generative AI could lead to innovative ways for companies to explore and manage their infrastructure.
