Why Insight Partners Is Betting Against the OpenAI Consensus

Every major venture dollar in AI is stacking on two names: OpenAI and Anthropic. Insight Partners is doing the opposite, and it’s saying so out loud.

Managing director Deven Parekh laid out the firm’s reasoning in a new TechCrunch interview, arguing that Insight is deliberately spreading its AI bets across the stack instead of concentrating capital in the two dominant foundation model labs that most of the industry now treats as the only trade worth making.

That decision matters for anyone raising money outside the OpenAI/Anthropic orbit right now. Founders building infrastructure, developer tooling, vertical applications or alternative model providers have spent the last stretch of this cycle watching a huge share of venture attention funnel toward a handful of frontier labs. If the dominant funds only write checks toward those two names, the rest of the ecosystem gets starved of capital regardless of how good the product is. Insight’s public stance signals that at least one large, active investor is explicitly not playing that game.

The mechanism here is straightforward portfolio math, not contrarian posturing for its own sake. A fund that concentrates its AI exposure in two companies is making a bet on two valuations, two product roadmaps and two sets of leadership decisions. Any stumble in either name — a model that underperforms, a pricing shift, a regulatory hit — hits the whole vintage at once. Spreading capital across infrastructure, tooling, applications and other model layers means no single company’s bad quarter can wreck the fund’s returns. It also means Insight can still win big if the value in this cycle ends up accruing somewhere other than the two labs everyone else is chasing.

For builders, the read is simple: the money is not actually as consolidated as the OpenAI-and-Anthropic headlines make it look. There is still serious capital looking for exposure to the rest of the stack. If your product lives in that rest-of-the-stack layer, this is evidence, not wishful thinking, that big funds are willing to back you instead of waiting for the next foundation model raise.

If you’re building in that layer, the piece on building end-to-end products in full agentic mode and the breakdown of what SpaceX’s IPO means for builders are both worth your time this week. Want more reads on where AI capital is actually moving? Subscribe at /subscribe/.