How Investors Evaluate AI Startups in 2026
2:06 mins
Key Insights
We asked top investors in Victoria how AI is changing startup evaluation. The pattern across answers is consistent: AI can accelerate execution fast, but investors still back defensibility, customer value, and long-term advantage.
- AI is becoming baseline in many categories, not a nice-to-have feature layered on later.
- Betty Zhang (Boson Ventures) points to AI-native thinking as a way to improve competitiveness and meet customer expectations.
- Hugh Stephens (Galileo Ventures) notes founders can move much further with smaller teams, shifting early-stage expectations.
- Nicholas Ooi (Investible) says investors still prioritize long-term defensibility over short-term AI features.
- Brett Ogilvie (Pacific Channel) highlights deep-tech and hardware opportunities where proprietary IP plus AI can create stronger moats.
Video Transcript
How is AI changing how investors evaluate startups?
Betty Zhang, Investment Manager, Boson Ventures
AI is a transformative technology and we use it day to day across our team. In deep tech and healthcare especially, founders are now expected to include AI or be AI-native in parts of their approach. It can speed up processes, create a more competitive product, and meet customer expectations.
Hugh Stephens, General Partner, Galileo Ventures
AI is changing how far founders can get very early. Tools like Claude Code mean teams can make astonishing progress with very slim engineering capacity. That creates new possibilities, but also new competitive forces founders need to navigate carefully.
Nicholas Ooi, Investor, Investible
With AI opportunities, one key question is long-term defensibility. You might not have defensibility on day one, but investors need a rational plan for how defensibility is built over time.
Brett Ogilvie, Pacific Channel
The world is abuzz with AI. For us, a strong pattern is interplay between proprietary hardware and AI augmentation. In one portfolio example, AI lifted diagnostic performance from better than a GP to better than a specialist.