How This Venture Capitalist Sees Into the Post-software Future

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The internet is full of rabbit holes—plenty of shallow ones, a few deep ones, and the occasional tunnel that opens into the future. The last kind are the ones tech investor Sumeet Singh is hunting when he sits down at Butler, a cafe in Brooklyn, with a cup of coffee and his iPad.

This is his Friday and Saturday morning ritual. The iPad is his designated deep-reading tool, a respite from the barrage of pings and notifications that flood his phone and laptop. It’s been loaded with research papers and articles about AI that he has bookmarked throughout the week. He unlocks the screen and opens the first page.

Singh’s job as a venture capitalist is to predict the future and fold that back into how he chooses which companies to invest in through his firm Worldbuild. And while not every article or book he reads will lead to a breakthrough, the process has paid off in the past.

In 2021, while others chased the crypto boom, Singh, who was then a partner at Andreessen Horowitz, noticed a second-order effect: A booming financial ecosystem was emerging, but it was riddled with fraud, creating a need for infrastructure and tooling that could detect fraud. This underscored his bet on Sardine, which was primarily serving fintechs such as neobanks and crypto exchanges at the time. Even after a collapse in cryptocurrency prices into 2023, Sardine’s fraud detection technology was still valuable to banks, online retailers, and fintech companies that operate far outside crypto. Earlier this year, the company raised a Series C at 10 times Singh’s entry valuation.

Those readings helped inspire his Thesis essay, in which he argued that the startups that will succeed in this new era of AI are those that build either:

The infrastructure layer—the stuff that keeps models scaling: compute, data, energy, and security
A new generation of apps that are built around what models make possible (as opposed to bolting AI onto existing workflows)

Let’s take a closer look at Singh’s research process.