The AI-native investment thesis: how venture capital is betting on a new generation of companies

At Bloomberg Invest 2026 in New York, one idea took the stage that will likely set the direction of venture capital for years to come. Rudina Seseri, founder and managing partner of Glasswing Ventures, put it bluntly: the future belongs to companies where artificial intelligence is not an add-on to an existing product but its architectural foundation. It sounds obvious, but the statement reflects a fundamental shift in how Silicon Valley and the global venture market evaluate tech startups.

To understand the context, it helps to recall what the industry has gone through over the past three years. After generative AI exploded in 2023, the market saw a wave of so-called "AI wrappers": thousands of startups took off-the-shelf language models, put an interface on top, and called themselves AI companies. Investors soured on them quickly. Most of these projects had neither a technological moat nor a durable competitive advantage. A single update to the underlying model was enough to make an entire category of products pointless. That painful experience shaped a new approach to evaluating AI startups, which Seseri calls the AI-native investment thesis.

Glasswing Ventures' approach rests on a sharp distinction between two types of companies. The first type uses artificial intelligence as a tool to optimize existing processes. These businesses add a chatbot to their website, automate some routine operations, and roll out predictive analytics. That's useful, but it doesn't create a new market. The second type is the AI-native company, where the entire business model, product architecture, and user experience are designed from the start around what artificial intelligence can do. According to Seseri, these are the companies that will become the next generation's corporate winners.

So which capital flows are we talking about? According to various analyst firms, global venture investment in AI keeps growing despite a broader market cooldown. But the structure of that investment is changing fundamentally. In 2023–2024, a large share of capital went to the infrastructure layer: chipmakers, cloud platforms, and foundation model developers. Now, more and more money is flowing to the application layer. Investors are looking for companies that solve specific industry problems in fundamentally new ways that would be impossible without AI. Healthcare, finance, law, industrial automation: AI-native leaders are emerging in each of these fields.

Seseri also took on one of the hardest questions investors face: how to tell a genuine AI-native company from a skilled imitation. She says the key criteria are proprietary data and models, the ability to learn continuously from user interactions, and the so-called "flywheel effect," where the product gets better with every new customer. A company that simply calls someone else's model through an API has none of these properties. A company that builds its own intelligence stack compounds its competitive advantage exponentially.

For the Russian tech market, this thesis carries particular weight. The domestic AI ecosystem is developing with limited access to some Western technologies, which, paradoxically, may encourage the creation of exactly these AI-native companies. When you can't just grab ready-made infrastructure and build a wrapper on top, you have to design the architecture from scratch. And if you do that with AI at the core, the result may turn out to be more competitive than Western counterparts built on borrowed components.

Seseri's talk at Bloomberg Invest 2026 marks an important watershed in the history of tech investing. The era when an "AI" prefix in a company's name automatically boosted its valuation is over. Investors will now look at architecture, not marketing. The question is not whether a company uses artificial intelligence, but whether it could exist without it. If the answer is "yes," it's not an AI-native company. And according to a growing number of venture capitalists, that's no longer a bet worth making.