Investing in 2030: Philippe Botteri (Accel), Tom Hulme (GV), and Jan Hammer (Index) at CVAI London

There’s no question AI is a global phenomenon. However, leading European VCs Philippe Botteri of Accel, Jan Hammer of Index Ventures, and Tom Hulme of GV still see ample opportunity for AI founders building applications and agents in specific markets that are highly regulated, like healthcare or law. “Those industries have historically been slower to adopt any new technology, but now it's become really a necessity for them to keep up, certainly on a global scale,” said Hammer. It’s less settled what the next best form factor for the breakout AI applications will be outside of chatbots, but voice is one promising path forward. Hulme pointed to companies like Neuralink and an unnamed startup in Israel that’s “that’s doing sort of pre-vocalization or silent speech” as two companies using AI to predict our next sentences before we can even say them out loud. “I look at my kids. They send voice notes on WhatsApp all the time, because it’s really quick and really efficient,” he said. Botteri emphasized some of the biggest breakthroughs at the model layer, from Stable Diffusion to those from Synthesia and Eleven Labs, are based here: “Europe is generating leaders,” he stated. All three investors shrugged off the concerns around scaling walls which less than a year ago dominated our conference. Advances in post-training and reasoning capabilities are making everyone optimistic. “I think there’s no end in sight,” Hulme said on the future capabilities of the models. Botteri predicted agents will bring in the next big shift in how most work is conducted across the next 12 to 24 months. When it comes to the rails underneath the applications, smart cybersecurity strength will be crucial, said Botteri. He touted his portfolio company Cyera’s work in data security, since AI will make cyberattacks worse while also building better tools to fight it. However, the panelists conceded that the exit market for AI startups remains elusive at the moment — though Scale’s recent deal with Meta will be a welcome windfall.