Allied Venture Partners

Hello Partners,

As a current or prospective partner, this newsletter provides exclusive insights into our investment strategy, portfolio companies, and industry trends.

Thank you again for your continued trust and support,

Matt Wilson, MBA

Founder & Managing Director | Allied Venture Partners

Team Updates

• Our core team, including Steve, Melinda, Brendan and Jeremy, is finalized.

• Our Scout and Advisory programs continue to expand with several new members each week, providing quality diversified deal flow from across Canada and the United States.

New Deals

• We have finalized diligence on a new Seed-stage AI company alongside some very large institutional investors. The deal will be available to Allied LPs next week via your LP dashboard.

• We are currently in diligence with several more companies and expect a busy fall. Stay tuned for more updates.

Portfolio News

• Share expanded into two new cities, Kansas City and Alabama. Read Founder & CEO Andrew Kim’s recent feature in Made in CA.

• Vint continues to expand with double-digit MoM growth following the launch of their new marketplace.

• Rook signed another two clients last month and is also growing by double-digits MoM.

Industry Insights

The advent of large language models (LLMs) like GPT-4 heralds a new era for generative AI. As LLMs grow more powerful in synthesizing text, audio, images and more, they unlock tremendous commercial potential.

However, building generative AI into an existing business model is not a defensible competitive advantage. It’s table stakes.

Instead, the most valuable companies will be those advancing in foundational areas like model architecture, training techniques and dataset curation.

At Allied, our core values include “meaningful and sustainable differentiation.” Therefore, when assessing prospective investment opportunities, I’m focused on companies building cutting-edge generative AI capabilities that leverage their own proprietary models and datasets.

Although AI-related dealflow has increased exponentially, we’ve found that most instances are merely LLM wrappers on top of mediocre business models without any meaningful or sustainable differentiation.

I remain very bullish on the LLM space and believe it offers tremendous room for entrepreneurial creativity and the opportunity for generational wealth creation. However, as with any emerging market, we are seeing a flood of entrants, many without robust IP or unique capabilities.

In this burgeoning market, winners will be those pushing boundaries in data, research and engineering rather than simply rebranding existing capabilities.

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