AI-native companies will compound faster than AI-retrofitted ones.
The dominant question of the next decade is not whether AI matters but where in the architecture it lives. Companies bolting AI features onto products designed for a previous era are buying time. Companies designed around intelligence — where the data model, workflow routing, automation decisions, and user experience are all shaped by AI from day one — are building a different kind of business.
Bolted-on AI can be removed without breaking the product, which means it does not reshape unit economics. AI-native architectures cannot be unwound: every interaction trains the system, every workflow improvement compounds, every retention gain feeds the next cohort. The gap will look modest for a few years, then widen sharply. We back the second category, almost exclusively.