2025 won’t be like 1984: BoldCap’s AI Manifesto

Four decades after the personal computing revolution, the common thread among the tech disruptions of 1984 (personal computing), 1994 (dot-com), 2004 (social media & cloud), and 2024 (AI) is that a few bold builders disrupted the status quo. They fearlessly pushed the boundaries to reimagine how we live and work with technology.

We are talking from Steve Jobs to Sam Altman to the next big disruptor in this coming decade.

Thank You, Builders !!

Bold to Breakout

This decade belongs to bold, AI-native founders of Indian origin—building from anywhere, breaking out everywhere. We back them with conviction, capital, and community from Day 0 to escape velocity.

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We back founders who do more than build companies—they redefine human-machine collaboration by tackling deep technical challenges with enduring business impact.
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That’s legacy work and BOLD. 🙏

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This 4-Chapter Manifesto is about the making of Starship Station for AI Builders.

The Dawn | The Awakening | Force | Ascend‍

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Chapter 1: The Dawn of AI Native Companies - a New Breed of Builders

We feel that AI Native Companies are Quite Misunderstood: 

Over the past 12 months, we’ve been deep in the trenches—backing startups taking on legacy category leaders, and founders creating entirely new categories made possible by AI. We've also actively supported them through their following fundraising events, and one pattern has stood out across the board:

Many investors categorised them into existing software categories, leading most founders to spend considerable time helping investors understand the distinctions of AI-native companies. The most common misunderstandings include different views on

• What Product Market Fit is
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  PMF once meant stable customers, predictable revenue, and low churn. Today, rapid usage growth—even with high churn—can signal a different kind of fit: Problem-Market Fit. In the AI era, the very definition of PMF is being redefined.
• What is the defensible MOAT in AI?
  
  In the past, defensible moats and stickiness were achieved by embedding deeply into customer workflows. In the AI-native world, moats look different—they could stem from your product or technical approach, how you use reinforcement learning to adapt based on customer behaviour, strong early traction, or simply your ability to attract exceptional talent.
  
• TAM sizing (software market vs human capital market)
  
  AI-native startups don’t just sell software — they automate what people used to do. The real Total Addressable Market (TAM) isn’t enterprise tooling spend — it’s human capital budgets.

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And the list goes on.

Founders need an investor who understands and embraces the new reality of intelligent software disrupting traditional software. Investors, especially in the seed stage, need to return to being fearless and backing exceptional founders even when the market is still taking shape.

Based on this understanding, we have invested significant effort in developing relationships with global VCs who share our perspective and align with our founders' visions. We will discuss this in further detail later.

Supporting AI-native startups demands a distinct approach grounded in first-principles thinking, a deep understanding of human-system interactions, and an intuition for emerging trends. These companies aren’t just iterating on known playbooks but rebuilding them from scratch. They’re not just building products but reimagining how humans and machines will co-create the future of work and life.

Riya Shanmugham, co-founder of Hawcx — who led GTM at New Relic and Google had decided to venture out, and during a conversation with BoldCap, she strikingly said:

"The opportunity to protect a billion+ users doesn’t come up daily. The number of human-to-human, human-to-agent, and agent-to-agent interactions is about to explode — and we will be the authentication suite that supports that future.”

That single quote captures the scale and shift AI-native founders are building for. AI isn’t just another wave of software. The internet's interaction fabric is being rewritten. And it demands a new breed of builders.

We believe the startup ecosystem is entering a fresh five-year context window—one that calls for building new communities, deeper conviction, and a fundamentally new kind of venture support.

These formed the three core mandates of our AI-Native Fund. We will explore these mandates—context, community, and conviction—in greater detail, along with their implications for AI-native builders, in Chapter 4.

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Chapter 2: The Awakening of Rebels: The Age of Rebuilding the Fundamentals

While generalist funds may wait for clarity, AI-native funds invest early, particularly in founders who experiment, reimagine, and challenge existing paradigms. This isn’t just another tech cycle; it’s a historic shift.

That’s why we built Boldcap — not as a generalist fund with an AI thesis, but as an AI-native fund, designed to co-author the next chapter with those bold enough to build what’s never been built. Our conviction didn’t emerge in a vacuum; we forged it by staying close to early builders.

BoldCap x NEX

One of our portfolio companies, Nex, came to us with a Notion doc, a scrappy personal CRM, and an obsession with reimagining CRM from first principles for an AI-native world.

“What if your CRM could not only track customer interactions, but also deeply understand context and proactively act on next steps?”

We started using their personal CRM product and quickly saw their obsession with rethinking the CRM market. While personal CRM is a niche, we backed them early with conviction, knowing they wouldn’t stop there.

A few weeks in, they began building Nex, an AI-native business CRM, positioning themselves to challenge incumbents like HubSpot in the professional CRM market. It's the new David vs. Goliath. We saw Freshdesk take on Zendesk in the SaaS era — now, it’s AI-native players taking on SaaS incumbents.

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Chapter 3: Force of a New Foundation: From Applied Science to Human-Centered Tech

The age of AI is not just another technology wave. It’s a fundamental value shift—a redefinition of how software is built. It makes it possible to create multiple $10B outcomes with trillions of value-creation opportunities ready to be captured.

Traditional Saas models, which are deterministic, rule-based, and static, will inevitably give way to more dynamic, reasoning, and agentic software solutions.

• BoldCap x Maximor
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  Traditional Accounting SaaS requires teams to follow rigid workflows, such as preparing manual journal entries and reconciliations without context, as well as a repetitive, laundry list of checklist tasks. Maximor flips that model. As an agentic system, it understands the flow of work and automatically detects optimisations and exceptions. It orchestrates tasks across systems and stakeholders to accelerate finance operations, eliminating the need for humans to perform all the heavy lifting between different systems and accounting standards.
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  This isn’t just another sleeker and faster product—it's a new category of selling outcomes vs. DIY. It’s a new category of financial operations software that works with the team, not just for them. Static ledgers become dynamic processes that resolve, cutting close cycles from weeks to days, and soon hours.

Software will transcend task automation, possessing the capacity to reason, make decisions, take action, and continuously evolve.

• BoldCap x Spotdraft
  
  ‍Today, legal teams still rely on rigid contract workflows and static templates. But the future of legal ops isn’t automating more of the same.
  
  It’s about customising contracting workflows for each business case at scale, because AI can understand nuances, context, and intent.

Intelligent systems will typically reshape 30–40% of company budgets, which are currently allocated to people, as they take on more complex work.

• BoldCap x Enkrypt AI
  
  ‍One of our portfolio companies, Enkrypt AI, is building a security layer for AI applications. This layer enables enterprises to deploy AI safely without relying on armies of compliance experts, data privacy teams, or red-team testers. It tackles not just technical risk but also the human bottlenecks that slow enterprise AI adoption.
  
  While the total addressable market (TAM) for AI security software is currently pegged in the low billions, that lens misses the bigger picture. Enkrypt is replacing the human coordination costs behind “trusting AI' — including policy architects, regulatory operations, and information security analysts. That’s why the real TAM isn’t security software — it’s the 30–40% of the enterprise security budget spent on people whose workflows can now be redefined by intelligent systems.

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Chapter 4: Ascend Into The AI Native Decade: Here is our Manifesto & Note to Builders

1. Understand the Context window:

Built to hold the longest + deepest context with regards to builders in AI. Everything from product strategy, GTM and fundraising

• A Moment Like No Other: Beyond Incremental Innovation
  Incremental change tweaks the edges. AI-native innovation rewrites the rules. These aren't upgrades — they’re new foundations built from first principles. Legacy software can’t keep up. The next giants won’t be better versions of the past — they’ll be entirely different.
• The Awakening: When Software Began to Think
  
  Software was built to execute, not to think. But now, it reasons, decides, and even creates. This shift from task-driven to cognition-driven software unlocks a new era of intelligence, creativity, and possibility.
• The Trial Room Effect: New Minds for a New Age
  
  Many seasoned investors still attempt to fit AI-native startups into traditional SaaS templates — much like trying on clothes that never quite fit. The future belongs to those with fresh eyes, flexible thinking, and the courage to back what isn’t obvious.
• Founders First: Betting on the Brave
  
  In SaaS, investors backed clarity. In AI-native, they must have courage. The best founders aren’t just adapting — they’re inventing new realities and markets we didn’t know could exist.

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2. Build a Strong Community Around You:

Building something new is hard enough. Doing it alone is even harder. No one should have to figure this out alone.

That’s why we’re building a community of AI-native builders & operators. 

We’ve kept it simple:

• Whatsapp Group for Founders & Operators of our Portfolio, to discuss tactical everyday decisions on AI, including tech stack choices, finding AI engineers and more
• GTM Program called Bracket for operators across the globe to give tactical and timely advice, sometimes intros to customers or early hires
• Network of GP/partners at AI funds for your next fundraise
• Key in-house talent like a GTM Engineer, a Growth hacker to help founders with early GTM
  
• Building our AI stack to reinvent ourselves alongside you

When building something new, having the right people around you isn’t a nice-to-have — it’s leverage.

3. Our Deep Commitment to the BOLD Founders:

Backing category disruptors and creators only, Narrow window of 3-5 years to create decacorn companies, potentially

• Idea:
  
  Backing only takedowns and not incremental ideas. AI has finally made it Possible to take down almost all categories. From CRM to services.
• Founder:
  
  David vs Goliath DNA
• Investing:
  
  Seed-stage AI investing targets high-uncertainty opportunities where the founders' quality remains the only constant. We focus on backing bold founders aggressively pursuing large markets.

BoldCap x Maximor: Zero to Escape Velocity

What we love about BOLD is their deep commitment to being in the trenches with us, through rapid pivots, as a thought partner on product direction, helping us think through which customer profile to go after, and knowing when to raise (or not). They played a key role in helping us raise our next round from Tier 1 Bay Area VCs who are deeply committed to backing generational AI companies.

When it comes to AI-native startups, BoldCap just gets it, better than most early-stage VCs. We need more funds like these in India.
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Ramnandan,
Co-Founder of Maximor

Over the past year, we have worked closely with our founders to assist them in securing their subsequent funding rounds. We do our part in being thought partners to founders, helping them get outside-in perspective and enabling them to reach their next milestone. We are working to build BOLD as a platform designed to tilt the odds of success for our portfolio companies. Some of our current efforts include:

• Fundraising: Building deep networks in the Bay Area for simplifying fundraising.
• Specialists: Refine their GTM with in-house specialists across growth, marketing & sales.
• Launch Bracket — our GTM initiative to help the portfolio unlock early customers in the US market.
  

We’re not claiming to have all the answers about what it takes to build AI-native companies. However, by staying close to the builders and figuring it out in real-time, we’re better positioned to spot patterns as they emerge. This proximity to the frontier of applied AI is giving us a compounding edge, not from distance but from deep, embedded learning.

We have invested significant time in cultivating relationships with global VCs who share our vision and align with that of our founders. We work closely with a deep network of early-stage and growth AI Funds across the Bay Area, NY and India. Building this entire pipeline of investors, from seed stage to growth, is equally essential for these founders, as selecting the right partner is crucial.

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Closing Note: Our Commitment to AI Native Builders

Hello Builders!!

Here is our Bold Starship Station, where bold ideas turn into breakout starships 🚀

We’ve had the privilege of supporting AI-native builders from around the world. 

Here are a few Starships at the BoldCap Station and a few breakout companies that have achieved Escape Velocity.

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‍The AI Native Decade

We’ve started with a focused $25M seed fund to lead Pre-Seed and Seed rounds up to $1M. But our commitment doesn’t end there. Over the next 5-7 years, we aim to invest over $250 million alongside our founders, supporting them initially and throughout the moments that define breakout trajectories.

As our companies grow, we’re committed to growing with them—providing long-term tactical support and bringing in the right capital partners to help them realise their full potential.

We are standing at the start of a once-in-a-generation shift. The winners of the AI era will not look like yesterday’s SaaS giants.

They will be:

• Context Driven.
• AI-native at the core.
• Multi-Modal by design.
• Agentic by Architecture.
• Faster, leaner, and more intelligent than ever before.

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If you are a builder, Boldcap is here to partner with you from Day 0 to global scale. If you’re dreaming beyond what’s visible today, let's build the future together.