While much of Silicon Valley has poured unprecedented capital into the two biggest names in frontier AI, Insight Partners is deliberately taking the opposite route. Deven Parekh, the firm's longtime partner, argues that concentrating an entire portfolio's upside in OpenAI and Anthropic is a strategy built on hope rather than analysis, and that the smarter money is being made in the dozens of adjacent opportunities the boom has created.
Parekh's thesis rests on a simple observation from prior platform shifts: the giants that define a technology wave capture enormous value, but the durable, compounding returns historically flow to the picks-and-shovels businesses, vertical applications, and infrastructure layers that serve everyone regardless of which foundation model ultimately wins.
That philosophy shapes how Insight spreads its checks across AI-native software, data infrastructure, developer tooling, and applied research startups, rather than chasing the single hottest deal in every round. The firm believes diversification is not a lack of conviction but an abundance of it, grounded in the reality that model leadership remains genuinely unsettled.
The approach also insulates limited partners from the regulatory, competitive, and capital-intensity risks concentrated at the frontier. As valuations for the leading labs stretch to historic levels, Parekh's message to the venture community is pointed: betting the farm on one or two companies is a wager anyone can make, but building a portfolio that wins no matter which model dominates is the harder and, he contends, far more rewarding discipline.
