The Agentic Economy Is Here. Most Founders Are Building for the Wrong Layer.
AI agents are no longer demos. They are running payroll, closing deals, and deploying code in production. The question is no longer whether agents work. It is who captures the value.
Twelve months ago, AI agents were mostly impressive demos. A chatbot that could browse the web. A coding assistant that could fix a bug across multiple files. Interesting technology. Limited real-world impact.
That has changed completely. In the last six months, we have seen agents processing insurance claims end-to-end at Fortune 500 companies. We have seen agents managing entire customer support operations for mid-market SaaS companies. We have seen agents writing, testing, and deploying code changes with zero human intervention.
The agentic economy is no longer coming. It is here. And the distribution of value is becoming clear.
Where the Value Is Not
It is not in building another agent framework. The open-source community has flooded this space. LangChain, CrewAI, AutoGen, and dozens of others are all competent orchestration layers. They are useful. They are also commoditizing rapidly. Building a slightly better orchestration framework is not a venture-scale opportunity anymore.
It is also not in building general-purpose agents. The foundation model companies are coming for this space aggressively. OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google are all building agent capabilities directly into their platforms. Competing with them on general-purpose agent functionality is a losing game.
Where the Value Is
Vertical agent companies. The companies winning right now are building agents for specific industries with specific workflows. An agent that understands how insurance claims processing actually works, including the regulations, the edge cases, the integration with legacy systems. An agent that knows how pharmaceutical clinical trials are structured. An agent that understands construction project management.
These companies look boring from the outside. They are not building flashy demos. They are building products that replace $80,000-per-year knowledge workers in specific functions. The unit economics are extraordinary.
Agent infrastructure. If millions of agents are running in production, who monitors them? Who evaluates their output? Who handles the security implications of autonomous software with access to production systems? The tooling layer for managing agents in production is still wide open.
Agent-native workflows. The most interesting companies are not adding agents to existing workflows. They are designing entirely new workflows that are only possible because agents exist. Products that would make no sense if a human had to be in the loop, but become incredibly powerful when the loop is fully automated.
What We Are Deploying Into
We have made seven investments in the past quarter, all in the agentic economy. Three vertical agent companies. Two agent infrastructure plays. Two agent-native workflow products. The common thread: founders with deep domain expertise who understand that the opportunity is not in the agent itself, but in what the agent enables.
If you are building in this space, the window is open. The incumbents are still figuring out their strategy. The enterprise buyers are ready to purchase. The technology is mature enough to deliver real value. Apply through our Founder Intake Terminal.
Interested in what we are building? Apply through the Founder Intake Terminal.