Battery Ventures

Battery News & Market Trends Nick Elsner, Michael Hoeksema, Hailey Wilcox  |  July 30, 2026 Where AI Gets Physical: Robotics, Edge Devices, and Smart Sensors – And Why the Next Wave May Come More Quickly Than You Think Image created by AI The AI conversation in enterprise technology has been almost entirely about software—models, APIs, agents, workflows.

Software development has emerged as the killer use case for generative AI today, with half of all tokens consumed on OpenRouter being used for code generation. Cursor, for example, has ramped from $100M to $4B of ARR in the last 12 months. We’re in the first innings of the biggest shift in the history of software development: from humans manually writing code to swarms of long-running AI agents automatically building software.

Jenny Kang, Carl Narcisse, Susanne Richman  |  July 20, 2026 “Know-Your-Candidate” and Other Talent Truisms in the AI Era Image created by AI There’s been plenty of discussion lately over AI’s potential impact on jobs across industries. Which positions will survive? Which ones could be eliminated over time? And what new types of AI experts should companies be seeking out in this time of dramatic change?

After several years of record levels of investment, enterprise AI budgets are still growing. According to our latest enterprise technology spending survey, 98% of respondents are increasing their AI spend over the next 12 months, and not a single CXO surveyed is cutting back. But as budgets scale, it’s putting pressure on a harder question: Where are the returns? Most organizations are finding some measurable returns for AI—but very few can prove how meaningful AI is to the overall business.

Nick Elsner, Scott Goering, Evan Witte  |  July 17, 2026 AI Isn’t Replacing Humans, but It Is Changing Our Jobs a Lot Image provided by dreamstime The loudest narrative around AI and the workforce is the one about job loss. The data from our latest enterprise technology spending survey tells a more grounded story.

Sudheendra Chilappagari, Carl Narcisse  |  July 9, 2026 From Dirt to Tokens: How AI is Collapsing the Walls Between Apps and Infrastructure This image was generated by AI As long-time technology investors, we’ve seen the lines between applications and infrastructure blur faster than at any point since the cloud era. Our Battery General Partner Dharmesh Thakker recently traced this shift in his LinkedIn post.

Many enterprises are off to the races with agentic AI, snapping up technology in areas such as software development, customer support, IT operations and cybersecurity. But the return on this type of AI investment remains murky for some: A very sizable 94% of respondents said their organizations lacked a consistent, enterprise-wide framework for evaluating AI’s ROI.

In 1949, a 22-year-old accountant from Paterson, New Jersey visited a local company and discovered employees hadn’t been paid on time. Why? Because the one person who ran payroll was sick. Without that person, no one knew how to run the calculations to pay . That accountant was Henry Taub. Taub founded Automatic Payrolls that same year—a payroll-as-a-service company built around a simple promise: payroll shouldn’t depend on any single person. The timing was right.

June 1, 2026 AI✦NY 2026 Recap: Insights From Leaders at Databricks, Qatalyst Partners, Clay and More At our inaugural AI✦NY Summit — the next iteration of the CloudNY event we have held for the last nine years in partnership with VC firm FirstMark — leaders from the fastest-growing AI companies and top enterprises come together to break down what it actually takes to build, scale and sell in the AI era. Back To Blog

Battery has invested in more than 450 companies over our 40-year history, and we’ve been fortunate to back some very big ideas.