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Kothari: AI makes previously uninvestable legacy industries viable venture bets

Nikunj Kothari · Inside Silicon Valley’s VC Playbook | WTF is Venture Capital? - 2025 Edition | Ep. 24 · Nikhil Kamath · Aug 29, 2025 · at 19:37

Nikunj Kothari, Partner at FPV Ventures, explains how generative AI changes the investment viability of traditional and industrial businesses.

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“AI has actually made most industries that were uninvestable, suddenly investable. For example, like any industry that's collecting large amounts of data was like, you know, priorly prior, like you wouldn't invest in them because you were like, oh, there's no clear No way for you to understand this data. No clear way to take action on this data. Now that's become an actual, like, asset, because now you can either fine tune models or you can actually do something interesting with them, ah, that, that suddenly unlocks, unlocks value out of those.”

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