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Sr. Technology Editor at LinkedIn covering AI | Conference Moderator & Speaker | Columbia Journalism Grad | Ex-Business Insider
🚨A founder-turned-investor, defy.vc general partner Medha Agarwal’s portfolio includes infrastructure developer LiveKit, livestream shopping app Whatnot and healthcare AI startup Synthpop - Healthcare AI. She joins us for VC Wednesdays.🚨 ✒️What's your top investment priority in 2025 and why? I’ve been looking at vertical software for many years, but even more so over the past 12 months. One reason is that the advent of AI is enabling use cases that truly weren't possible before, and a lot of amazing founders are applying AI-enabled software into industries that could either see better user or customer experience, more efficiency or lower costs. Also, AI has flown open the gates of distribution. With the average consumer trying ChatGPT, they're so much more open to having a conversation, demo or trial. That's changing the equation for what a vertical software company traditionally looked like. ✒️ What are recent investments that fit this thesis? Many haven’t been announced yet, but one is a company called Synthpop, which is automating the end-to-end workflow for healthcare providers that are referral-based. Historically that's been a very long and manual process, and can be very error-prone. But now, with LLMs and agents, you can automate a good amount of it, if not all of it. ✒️Yet, SaaS pricing doesn’t necessarily work for AI startups, right? Part of the reason is that these companies now have the opportunity to dip into labor or services budgets, because they're either enhancing or replacing humans. And so, the dollars that are spent in a company for that versus just a tool is often an order of magnitude larger — and that changes the economics. Synthpop is a great example, where they can charge for every task completed successfully. But it’s different for every company based on the end users, their budgets and usage. First, you have to decide whether a fixed or some kind of a usage-based fee makes more sense, and then, whether you want to price it based on inputs or outcomes. There’s a lot more options than before, and it leads to a lot more value capture. ✒️ What does Klarna’s IPO mean for the startup ecosystem? More liquidity is better for everybody, and a private company going public will provide liquidity for both investors and employees. The fact that Klarna was able to become profitable — even modestly — is a great achievement. A vast majority of companies do not when they're going public, and even years after they’ve gone public. It shows the progress that growth-stage companies have made to move away from growth at all costs to unit economics and efficiency. ✒️ What’s one investment that you regret passing on? I had been looking at the collectibles market for a while, but regret passing on Whatnot’s Series A, because it was just really early days. I was lucky that I ended up investing eventually, but wish I’d done it sooner. #VCWednesdays #vc #venturecapital #startups #TechonLinkedIn