Startups in the AI Era: Balancing Innovation and Resilience
How Founders Harness AI and Navigate Global Shifts
At the 2025 World Economic Forum, a panel of leading voices in tech and venture capital shared their views on AI’s impact on the startup landscape and strategies for navigating uncertainty in today’s dynamic market.
Here are the key takeaways from their discussion.
Speakers
Moderated by Brian Sozzi, Executive Editor of Yahoo Finance, the conversation featured:
- Hemant Taneja, Chief Executive Officer and Managing Director, General Catalyst
- Mohit Bhatnagar, Managing Director, Peak XV Partners
- Kate Ryder, Founder and Chief Executive Officer, Maven Clinic
- Arvind Jain, Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer, Glean
Global Resilience and Innovation
The conversation opened with a discussion on how startups are adapting to global economic and political changes. Hemant Taneja highlighted two key trends:
- Global Resilience: “The geopolitics is driving every country to think about the resiliency of their industries — defense, healthcare, energy, industrial, and financial services.”
- Applied AI: Taneja emphasized the increasing maturity of AI applications: “You now have use cases that are starting to show the ROI of the application of AI into enterprises.”
These trends are mobilizing capital and talent in new ways. However, Taneja warned:
“The peak uncertainty around the politics and the evolution of technology makes it difficult to say what companies are going to be around and be aligned with where the world’s going.”
The AI Transformation: 2025 and Beyond
AI emerged as a dominant theme, with panelists underscoring its transformative potential.
“AI has started an economy-wide transformation of the enterprise,” said Taneja, outlining three priorities for startups to succeed with AI:
- Infrastructure: “Having infrastructure that actually readies you to take advantage of AI.”
- AI Evolution: “All the technologies being built, the foundation models, I think they’re maturing with the right APIs on top to be usable.”
- AI Agents: “You have to think about having a human workforce and an AI workforce that now has to become a single workforce.”
For startups, investing in AI isn’t optional. Arvind Jain explained, “Every large enterprise today wants to drive transformation with AI. Everybody believes that if they don’t invest in AI today, they’re going to be left behind.”
The panelists agreed that 2025 marks a shift from experimentation to implementation.
Rethinking Consumer and Enterprise Experiences
AI is also reshaping consumer experiences. Mohit Bhatnagar urged startups to take an AI-first approach to redesign legacy systems.
“Think of your boring OTA [online travel agency] experience that you’ve done for the last 10 years. Think of the way you buy products online. I think there’s an AI first approach to each one of these that can be reimagined, and I’m really excited about that.”
Public vs. Private: Decisions for Startups
The decision to go public is a major turning point for any startup. Kate Ryder, whose company Maven Clinic is the largest virtual clinic in women’s and family health, shared why her company remains private:
“Actually, one of our biggest competitors is a public company, and we’ve just overtaken them in valuation… because we have been able to, I think, grow faster, and then again, spend a little bit more. We’re not as constrained by getting profitable tomorrow”
Staying private has allowed Maven to focus on innovation, including expanding into fertility benefits. “We just built a huge new product in fertility benefits, where we’re now the payer,” said Ryder, which Maven may not have been able to do as a public company.
On the flip side, Taneja noted that going public can promote discipline. “I have forced companies in the past to go public because I thought they were not very financially disciplined, because the public market puts that pressure on you.” He added that the market decides when the timing is right.
Navigating Regulations and Geopolitics
The panel also weighed in on how startups are navigating the regulatory and political landscape. Taneja noted that startups working in regulated industries like healthcare or defense need to collaborate with governments.
“As technology has gone mainstream and we’re touching industries like defense, industrials, energy — they are regulated industries for the most part... When we’re touching these industries, it actually is a muscle we have to develop.”
In women’s health, Ryder pointed to both challenges and opportunities. “There’s some unfortunate policy in women’s health right now,” that restricts access to care at the state level. However, she noted tailwinds in fertility benefits.
Meanwhile, Bhatnagar highlighted the resilience of India’s public markets: India today has retail investors putting $3 to $3.5 billion of domestic money into public markets every month.
“We’re actually feeling pretty good about the long term prospects of companies returning to India, re-domiciling in certain cases, and listing”
Success Story: India’s Startup Boom
India stood out as a bright spot in the global startup ecosystem. Bhatnagar described its remarkable growth: “India today is perhaps the world’s third largest startup ecosystem,” he said. “In 2011, we probably had one company that had crossed a billion dollars in valuation. Today, India has about 110 of these companies, so-called unicorns.”
Bhatnagar attributed this success to two factors:
- Domestic Capital: Access to capital has never been easier, and domestic funding is more available than ever before.
- Global Reach: “We are building products that are built in India but really for the world,” he explained. Bhatnagar predicted that India will probably have more unicorns than China over the next decade.
Advice for Founders
The panelists offered advice for aspiring entrepreneurs:
Have a nuanced understanding of problem you’re solving
“We should entirely expect (the founder) to have a very nuanced, a very, very deep understanding of the root cause of what the problem is stemming from. And I think that, in my mind, at least motivates a lot of investors to go bet and work with that.” ~ Mohit Bhatnagar
Embrace iteration, agility, and ambiguity
“The teams that are just highly iterative right now and understand that you’re just going to navigate ambiguity for a while and not be scared of it and run to it are the ones that will have the best chance of coming out on the other side of this as businesses.” ~ Hemant Taneja
Stay adaptable
“I’ve asked every one of our engineering leaders to actually throw one thing out that they build every three months, and that’s the measure that… they are not getting too attached to their system.” ~ Arvind Jain
Systematically think about how to transform your operations with AI
“For us, not an AI native company, our job is to integrate as much AI as possible. We’ve kind of told all of our teams, you must be a big AI integrator this year.” ~ Kate Ryder
Looking Ahead
From AI’s transformative power to new and thriving startup ecosystems, the discussion painted a picture of both challenges and opportunities in the years ahead. As Ryder put it, the segmentation Maven was doing three years ago “will look like a dinosaur product” compared to what it can do three years from now.
For startups, the path forward is clear: adapt quickly, integrate innovation, and stay excited. As Taneja concluded:
“We’ve never been more excited to come to work.”
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Disclaimer: This article uses various LLMs to transcribe, summarize, and proof-read. All content for the article was hand-curated and checked for quality.
