[Latent Space LIVE @ NeurIPS] State of AI Startups 2025 — with Sarah Catanzaro, Amplify Partners

Okay. We're here with Sarah Car and Zarrow from Amplify. Welcome. Thank you. First time on the pod. To be here. I Too long. I know. I know. We've we've known each other for so long. That's it. Yeah. Never made an appearance. It also made the transition from data to AI, I guess. I I don't know if if, I did. I don't know if you were always, like, as deep on on on AI, but I'll be there's a lot of simpatico. Yeah. I've always actually kind of oscillated between data and AI. Sure. Like, arguably, I started my career in quote, unquote AI. It was just more like symbolic systems back then. But as you said, I think, like, they're they're so symbiotic. Like, it it's almost hard to divorce them. That's actually what brought me into data. I was like, I want to better understand what happens when I write a SQL query. So Yeah. Let's briefly touch on data because I I think obviously that's that's a lot of where you and I first met. D b g five trend. That was so cool. I mean, or Yeah. How do you how do you how do you think about the end of the modern data stack? Okay. So so, like, a lot of people look at the, like, d b t five tran, merger and, like, talk about the end of the modern data stack. And I think that is, like, a fundamentally wrong take. Both of these companies were growing, you know, very healthily. Both of these companies You funded DBT? We funded DBT. So so, like, both of the companies were actually, like, beating their revenue targets. I think what you're more seeing is, you know, IPO environment wherein companies are expected to have far more than, you know, like, a 100,000,000 revenue. And so What would you say the bar is now? 300? No. Like, above 600. 600. Yeah. Yeah. And the combined company is 400? I believe that they'll actually be close to 600. I don't have the exact number. But they clearly just getting ready for IPO. So so so, you know, basically, like, the merger was a way to accelerate that path to liquidity. As you might remember And they were the presumptive winners in their categories anyway. So Exactly. You know, I think one of the things that has actually, pleasantly surprised me, and this speaks to, again, the symbiotic relationship between, you know, data and AI. Many of the big frontier labs are actually using both DBT and Fivetran. I recall talking to folks at, Thinking Machines, like, within weeks of the company's formation, and DBT was already an important part of their stack. Certainly, like, training datasets need to be managed. We need insight into what users are doing on these platforms. And in fact, like, the way in which you would analyze interactions with an agent or analyze interactions with an LLM is even more …