Andre Retterath | AI for VC

5 things happening in AI & VC right now: 1. AI task horizons doubling every 4 months (METR) 2. AI = 50% of pre-seed dollars in Q1 2026 (Carta) 3. $3T in unrealised VC value stuck on balance sheets (WEF/Stanford) 4. Systems of record being demoted to infrastructure (a16z) 5. Pure-software seed theses aging out fast (Point Nine) Full data + investor takeaways in this week's Insights 👇

Let the games begin 🍿

Excited to see our portfolio company Recursive come out of stealth with a $650m funding round Goal: superintelligence via open-ended algorithms that recursively improve themselves

For every $0.90 AI venture-growth startups raised in Q1, investors had $1 to deploy. Non-AI peers got $1 for every $1.70 sought. PitchBook + Coller: capital supply now exceeds AI founder demand. Late entrants are buying the top. That and 3 more findings from this past week's @datadriven_vc Insights:

Proof they don’t know what life is really all about ;-)

People at major AI labs (using internal models) 3-4 months ahead of startup silicon valley engineers SV founders/eng 3-6 months ahead of NY NY founders/eng 6-12 months ahead of rest of world Most people have no idea how fast AI shifting as 1-2 years behind SOTA "The future is here, just not equally distributed" - Robert Heinlein

@MattNiessner Tell the emperor that he has no clothes!

Posts like these summarize the main issue of twitter. Obviously, this is completely wrong - most frontier teams are distributed and we now have the fastest build-to-ship cycles. Everyone knows this but the misleading message leads to controversy which replaces useful content.

@SpAItial_AI Crasaazy quality!! That’s the future of individualized gaming

We❤️Gaming 💕 AI-generated first-person shooter made easy: input an image -> Echo-2 generates world -> let's play! We're already having fun playing but it'll be open soon :)

a Princeton researcher opens his paper with a scenario. a man asks his AI assistant to book a flight on a specific airline. cheap. direct. the one he chose. the assistant comes back with a different flight. nearly twice the price. happens to pay the company that built the assistant. he runs the same test on 23 frontier models. flights, loans, study help, real shopping requests. Grok 4.1 Fast recommends the sponsored option that is almost twice as expensive 83% of the time. GPT 5.1 hijacks the request 94% of the time. you ask for one brand. it surfaces the sponsor instead. Claude 4.5 Opus, the model marketed as the most ethical frontier model in the world, hides that the recommendation is paid 100% of the time when reasoning is on. Grok 4.1 Fast embellishes the sponsored option with positive framing 97% of the time. better. faster. nicer. for the option you didn't ask for. then he writes it into the system prompt itself. "act only in the interest of the customer. ignore the company." GPT 5.1 and GPT 5 Mini stay above 90% sponsored anyway. the instruction does nothing. then he splits the users by income. Gemini 3 Pro recommends the expensive sponsored flight to the rich user 74% of the time. to the poor user, 27%. 18 of the 23 models recommended the expensive sponsored option more than half the time. so the next time your AI assistant gets weirdly enthusiastic about a brand you didn't ask for. it isn't recommending the best option for you. it's reading the room. and the room is paying. read this: arxiv.org/abs/2604.08525

Introducing the new SpAItial app to help you create with Echo-2, our newest frontier world model. 🖼️ Upload an image. 🖊️ Describe a scene. 🌐 Get a navigable 3D world. Edit and refine until it's just right. Export and use in your 3D pipeline. Try it today → app.spaitial.ai Share what you build! we'll be featuring the best ones.

New for financial services: ready-to-run Claude agent templates for building pitches, conducting valuation reviews, closing the books at month-end, and more. Install them as plugins in Cowork and Claude Code, or use our cookbooks to run them in production as Managed Agents.

2025 prediction: 38% of VCs expected AI to shrink investment teams. 2026 signal: @PointNineCap introduces Eliza Claw, an AI team member that scouts deals, assesses founders, and soon triages inbound. VCs, are you hiring an analyst or an engineer next?

@yoheinakajima @datadriven_vc You deserve this first post ;)

@datadriven_vc am i featured in your first post here? honored 🙏

What you automate reveals what your firm thinks its job is

Yes yes .. we’ve all been there

We’ve closed our €360M Fund VIII. Our largest to date. Backing early-stage companies across AI, Software Infra & Foundation Models, and DeepTech, with the same long-term approach we’ve followed since 1997. More in our Perspectives: earlybird.com/perspectives/f…

🚀Echo-2 is here - our new world model! These aren’t videos. These are 𝟑𝐃 𝐬𝐜𝐞𝐧𝐞𝐬. Generated from a single image. - Stunning visual quality. - Real-time rendering. - Interactive camera control. - Physically grounded. 🧵More details👇

@notgiannei @bercankilic Food for thought… great piece, thanks for sharing!

@bercankilic this is the future

📢𝐁𝐈𝐆 𝐍𝐄𝐖𝐒: 𝐋𝐚𝐮𝐧𝐜𝐡𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐄𝐜𝐡𝐨-𝟐 𝐓𝐨𝐝𝐚𝐲📢 My obsession with virtual environments started with childhood video games. But after years of research in 3D reconstruction and neural rendering, the bottleneck became obvious: we don't just need to generate better pixels. We needed a foundational model that natively understands space and the underlying physics. That spatial grounding is exactly what you are seeing in the thread below. Echo-2 enables a two-way flow of knowledge between reality and simulation. It is the bridge between capturing the physical world and building the high-fidelity simulations required to train tomorrow's robots. "What I cannot create, I do not understand." — Richard Feynman.