New Enterprise Associates (NEA)

Exiting the Frontier Labs Era for AI Venture Capital Venture has traditionally focused on revenue scale and growth when evaluating large capital raises. However, in the past few months, the traditional AI venture model has been upended by multibillion-dollar rounds for companies with no revenue, no product, and in some cases no model. The question is why.

Thirty years of business intelligence has failed the people it was created for and incumbents cannot fix it—the moment to build something new has finally arrived. Every generation of analytics software has promised to put data in the hands of the people who need it. And every generation has found a new way to fall short. The first generation locked insight within static reports and behind IT approvals.

David Conte, CFO of Databricks, and NEA’s Mark Hawkins discuss how AI is reshaping data, governance, and forecasting for modern finance leaders As AI evolves from experimental to essential, leaders are learning to navigate a new competitive frontier. Few understand what this means for corporate finance and administration better than Dave Conte, CFO of Databricks.

The Internet, Until Now For nearly twenty-five years, the internet moved in one direction: outward. Each year unleashed a surge of new websites, apps, creators, and marketplaces – all battling for a  sliver of our shrinking attention span. Distribution sprawled, inventory ballooned, and the dominant logic of the web emerged: if you build something, someone will eventually find it. Advertising thrived on this abundance. That era is coming to a close, and a new version of the internet is taking over.

“The great opportunity is not beating the latest benchmark – it is in building the enterprise abstraction which enables modernization of codebases.

This post is less a set of predictions than it is a working thesis towards the next chapter of fintech. We’ve outlined what we see as the foundations that underpin the generation before us, four particularly compelling opportunities, and a few assertions about the future of payments, money, and financial services. I. Foundations Macro developments support the thaw in early-stage fintech. Public markets are again rewarding innovation, not just short-term profit. Multiples have reset.

Blog by Ann Bordetsky and Mason Murray|Aug 20, 2025 Since the arrival of the open web and online commerce, search engines, marketplaces and social feeds defined information and product discovery for consumers. Entire ecosystems of marketing and advertising infrastructure emerged to help brands and companies participate in new distribution channels. Now, brands and businesses need to adapt to an unprecedented shift in consumer behavior and the rise of the AI agent as a new customer.

Two years into the AI platform shift, consumer applications are leading global adoption. ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, and others have introduced AI to over a billion users and are quickly becoming the default interface layer for digital life. As these platforms take on more tasks, raw intelligence is no longer enough. The difference between a helpful assistant and a generic one is context: an understanding of the user’s routines, preferences, relationships, and history.

Q&A Interview Five years ago, long before A and I were the only two letters in the startup alphabet, Rebecca Hu-Thrams had a glimpse of the future.

Klarna filed its prospectus last week, revealing the metrics and mechanics behind one of the most structurally ambitious consumer fintechs to scale globally. Born as a payments workaround in Sweden, Klarna now processes over $100B in annual volume, operating at the intersection of credit, checkout, and consumer experience.