General Catalyst buys declining businesses to grant startups customer access
Hemant Taneja · Why AI will dwarf every tech revolution before it: robots, manufacturing, AR glasses from CES 2026 · Jan 14, 2026 · at 13:04
Hemant Taneja is the CEO of General Catalyst. He explains that General Catalyst buys mature operating companies strictly to grant startup founders immediate customer access and distribution.
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“This is not about trying to be PE. This is about acquiring businesses in PE that actually have declining value, but have important customers that need to be served and help them get to that AI transformation that Bob's talking about faster by getting our founders in there.”
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More from Hemant Taneja
Taneja: Anthropic's valuation grew to hundreds of billions on real growth
“You look at Anthropic, Which we're also investors in. That goes from sixty billion dollars last year to, you know, a couple hundred billion dollars. So like, and by the way, with good economic progress, these are not pine to sky valuation. They're based on act…”
Taneja: General Catalyst's Anthropic investment at $60B was last year's cheapest VC deal
“We ended up investing at, you know a eight, nine, ten billion dollar kind of run rate business at sixty billion. That's the cheapest deal that got done last year in venture capital. On a financial basis.”
Taneja: Anthropic and OpenAI could realistically become trillion-dollar companies
“Now we're talking about, can we create trillion dollar companies, right? I mean, that's not a pie in the sky idea with Anthropic and OpenAI and a couple others.”
General Catalyst converted an Ohio nonprofit health system to a for-profit
“Why did we go you know acquire a health system in Ohio? It was a nonprofit. We worked with the attorney general, converted it.”