Garg: Incumbents are not well-suited to build context graphs
Ashu Garg · ⚡️Context Graphs: according to the authors — Jaya Gupta, Ashu Garg, Foundation Capital · Feb 4, 2026 · at 4:53
Foundation Capital partner Ashu Garg explains why context graphs present an opportunity for AI startups rather than established enterprise incumbents.
0:00 / 0:06exact quote · 6.2s
▶ Watch the full episode on YouTube → 720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“And we also believe, and we'll talk about it more, that it's unique and new, and it's not well suited for incumbents.”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →
More from Ashu Garg
Garg: Context graphs will be AI's most critical layer over next decade
“There is an intermediate abstraction Which we call context graphs, which is the accumulation of decision traces. And this incumulated abstraction, in our opinion, will be the one that will matter the most over the next decade. It's the enduring layer for the m…”
Garg: Context graphs for unstructured data will consist of small models
“And so where the unstructured data is such a large part of it and conversation data is such a large part, most likely the context graph will actually consist of small models.
The context graph itself is a model layer.
Like you use that data to train a set of m…”
Garg: Deep automation will be solved by dedicated companies, not Glean
“Glean's an amazing company, and I have a lot of respect for Arvin, but it's so horizontal. Like it's a very powerful chatbot, and it allows people to build some agentic applications or systems of agents on top of them, but really the deep cross-functional cros…”
Garg: Context graph stack will eclipse modern data stack value by 10x
“Two, I think the enabling infrastructure stack for context graphs would be well-defined. And there will be variations and flavors, but, you know, I totally anticipate that this time next year we'll be writing, okay, here's, here's the way, here's the best prac…”
Ashu Garg: Enterprises will not build universal context graphs
“We think context graphs, because they have to emerge from the automation of a specific set of tasks or business processes. Like no one's going to do or can do the work to say, let me capture all the decision tracing organization and put them in one universal c…”