We dive deep into our sectors. Our research drives our insights and thesis-driven approach.

Core to Equal’s investment philosophy is finding ways for technology to have impact where it’s previously been under-utilized. While there are many markets where there are known buyers for high functioning products, we’ve witnessed many large markets that experience extremely limited willingness-to-pay for software where it makes more sense for startups to “eat” the core advantages of their IP. My colleague Ali highlighted this in one of our most recent posts, introducing the concept of “Hidden AI”. For these companies, AI is at the core of their competitive advantage, but is rarely seen to the end customer. On the outside, they appear to operate much like incumbents, but underneath the surface is where all the competitive advantage lies.

As we highlighted in our recent Insurance x AI and Logistics x AI posts, we’re starting to see the first wave of breakout Vertical AI companies across sectors. We’ve been tracking many of these closely and have backed several thus far. As we’ve done so, we’ve started to see a few distinct patterns emerge in how AI takes shape across industries, and how market conditions allow certain approaches to flourish over others.

This past week, we participated in Climate Week NYC with our biggest Climate Capital Summit yet. For us, it was important to bring an audience bigger in scope and scale than we had in the past given the tumultuous state of the climate universe.

This week, the global climate conversation will descend on New York City for Climate Week. It's an annual moment where leaders from government, business, and civil society converge to discuss, debate, and drive action on one of the most pressing issues of our time. But while the main stage events often grab headlines, some of the most critical dialogues happen behind the scenes, away from the lecterns and formal panels. They take place in hotel lobbies, at informal roundtables, and between people tasked with funding the future of innovation that is at once our biggest hope and greatest challenge.

The global Logistics sector is a $10 trillion industry that touches everything we consume, yet much of it still runs on a fragmented set of disjointed legacy systems. The transportation infrastructure that enables goods to get from producers to consumers and powers the global economy is overdue for transformation.