Build AI - by gAI Ventures

This is a special edition of Build AI, recorded shortly after the gAI Ventures LP lunchat Citizens Private Bank in Menlo Park.Amit Goel, Vijay Rajendran, and Kushal Prakash — the three partners at gAI Ventures —sit down to unpack the insights they shared with limited partners and prospectiveinvestors: how they're reading the current phase of the AI wave, what the "SaaS-pocalypse"actually means, why "tasks are not jobs" is the framework they use to evaluate newventures, and what they've learned from 18 months of building vertical AI companiesacross financial services, enterprise productivity, and commerce.This is candid, unfiltered thinking from three partners who spend every day co-buildingvertical AI companies with domain experts.

Paolo Sironi has spent 25+ years inside the financial services industry, first as aquantitative risk manager in investment banking, then as a fintech founder, and todayas the Global Research Leader for Banking & Financial Markets at the IBM Institute forBusiness Value, where he advises C-level executives at financial institutions worldwide.He's a 6x bestselling author whose book, including "Banks and Fintech on PlatformEconomies", have become required reading for fintech leaders. He hosts The Bankers'Bookshelf podcast and is one of the most respected voices in global fintech.In this episode, Amit Goel sits down with Paolo for a wide-ranging conversation on thestate of AI in banking, why most institutions are still stuck in tactical deployments,and what the next decade of financial services will actually look like.

Div Garg has spent nearly a decade in AI. Google, Apple, Nvidia, Uber, Collaborative Robotics (first founding engineer), and a Stanford PhD, where he created the university's first course on Transformers (CS 25, 1M+ YouTube views).In early 2024, he co-founded MultiOn, which was one of the first viral AI agents on the web, with a launch video that hit 1M+ views.In 2025, he turned down a near-$1M offer from OpenAI to spin out a new research lab: AGI Inc., a company betting that the future of AI isn't in the cloud. It's on your device.In this episode, Amit Goel sits down with Div for a wide-ranging conversation on the current state of AI, why on-device intelligence is the next frontier, and how to build a category-defining company in a market that doesn't believe in your bet yet.

In this conversation, Amit Goel, Vijay Rajendran, and Kushal Prakash debate why the 2024–25 hype cycle of generic copilots and chatbots failed enterprises, why "the juice isn't worth the squeeze" for most generic deployments, and why the next decade belongs to hyper-vertical AI — purpose-built systems that solve specific, deep, regulated workflows that horizontal models simply cannot.For accredited US investors interested in our startup fund, write to [email protected] investment is subject to accreditation verification. This podcast is not an offer to sell securities.

In this episode of the Build AI Podcast, Amit Goel sits down with Andrew Roberts, Co-Founder & CEO of Deliverables AI — the AI platform helping investment banks, private equity firms, and M&A advisors automate the creation of Confidential Information Memorandums (CIMs), pitch books, and investment committee decks.

What if the real winners in AI aren’t the ones using it… but the ones redesigning work around it?In this episode of the Build AI Podcast, we sit down with Lutz Finger — former product leader at Google, LinkedIn, and Snap, faculty at Cornell, and a leading voice in AI, product strategy, and generative workflows.From starting as a quantum physicist to building products in Silicon Valley, Lutz shares a powerful perspective on what’s actually changing in the AI era — and what most founders and enterprises are getting wrong.

Jason Shuman, Partner at Primary Venture Partners, $625M fund - the largest seed investor in New York on gAI Ventures podcast. In this episode, he shares exactly how he thinks about the Vertical AI opportunity, why hardware is massively underrated, and what founders are getting wrong about building in 2025.

Primary VC has backed companies like Latch, Dandy, Bobyard, Marker Learning, and Light Table - with ~90% of portfolio companies raising a Series A and ~20% becoming unicorns. Jason now leads Vertical AI and hardware autonomy investments, and he's one of the most vocal voices on X about the structural shifts reshaping software, services, and how companies are actually built today.

Nick Holzherr is a 3x founder, company builder, angel investor, and former CEO of Whisk (acquired by Samsung), where he scaled to 120 people and built one of the earliest fully distributed global teams before remote work was mainstream. Whisk scaled globally, integrated with Walmart, Amazon, Tesco, Nestlé and more, reached 4.8 app ratings, and was featured by Apple 200+ times before acquisition.Now, as Founder of GitLaw, Nick is rethinking how startups handle legal infrastructure in the AI era, offering open-source, lawyer-vetted documents powered by AI collaboration.🔗 Explore GitLaw (Free AI-powered legal templates):🎁 Get 1 month free with code: gaiventureshttps://git.law/?utm_source=Interview&utm_medium=Podcasts&utm_campaign=gaipodcast

In this episode, we sit down with Jahn Karsybaev, Co-Founder and Managing Partner at Big Sky Capital, an early-stage venture capital firm backing enterprise B2B SaaS and AI companies across the US, Southeast Asia, and Central Asia.

In this episode, we sit down with Carter Huffman, CTO and Co-Founder of Modulate AI. GTA, Call of Duty, uses his Voice AI models.