At Zetta Venture Partners, it's our mission to help technical founders turn machine learning models into market-leading companies. We were the first VC firm exclusively focused on identifying and supporting AI-driven, B2B businesses — and we remain as confident in this thesis as we did when we began, especially given the growing transformational impact of applied AI in critical domains like biotechnology, climate technology, DevOps and cloud infrastructure, security, and more.

Since the launch of our first fund in 2015, we’ve seen the commercial AI ecosystem transform: models and data have become more sophisticated as compute has become more accessible, and AI and ML techniques have come to be seen as a competitive edge with clear value delivery. Over the last several years, increasing numbers of AI-native companies have emerged and been successful, helping businesses solve problems in dozens of sectors.

As investors, operators, product leaders, and engineers ourselves, we’ve had a front-row seat to enterprise AI company-building in a wide array of contexts. We’ve met, partnered with, and learned from the leading founders and researchers who paved the way and built the AI-driven products that created the field as we know it today–and think that there are important lessons to spotlight about the unique aspects of building a business in this technology area.