How to Be Investable AI Startup in 2025
+ Green & Red Flags for Startups
While 2024 was a phenomenal period for AI startups (according to Crunchbase, such projects raised $314B!), 2025 promises to be even better. Today, let's find out what you need to know to build an attractive company for investors.
In this issue:
Green & Red Flags for AI Startups
AI Regulation (Where are the Best Conditions?)
What AI Startup Should Be in 2025
We will also “paint” an image of an ideal AI startup according to VCs.
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Green Flags for AI Startups
Summarizing the positions of venture capital firms and private investors, startups seeking attention in 2025 should focus on three major green flags.
1. AI Agents
And here we go again. AI agents, autonomous systems capable of completing tasks without constant human input, are reshaping the AI landscape. So, it's kind of obvious that startups leveraging agents to deliver practical, scalable solutions—whether automating customer interactions or optimizing workflows—stand out to investors.
One of the best examples is Loveable from one of our previous posts. It’s building an AI tool that allows you to create apps without coding skills. This product type is following SaaS and encroaching on the status quo. That’s why it's unsurprising that Loveable raised €6.8M even before the project generated revenue.
More on startups developing AI agents here:
2. Focus on Enterprises
Entrepreneurial startups are attractive because of their stability and revenue potential. By solving specific problems for organizations-especially in narrow and unwieldy areas-startups signal their own reliability.
Investors often prefer this approach to riskier consumer markets.
3. Task-Specific Solutions
The next green flag actually applies to more than just AI.
However, it is in this niche that task-specific solutions easily stand out from startups that are floundering. That's because it's a proven strategy. Task-specific solutions resonate with investors because of their clear value proposition and focused execution, making it easy to assess market fit and growth potential.
One area we’re looking at is companies that focus on task-specific models. While the foundational models are well established, I find models that excel at specific functions particularly intriguing, especially when combined with agents built on top of them.
Mark Rostick, vice president and senior managing director, Intel Capital
Benchmark Example: Harvey AI
A good case study of a startup that combines all three green flags is Harvey AI. This company develops AI products for lawyers and law firms. It offers a unified and intuitive interface for all legal workflows, allowing lawyers to describe tasks in plain English instead of using a set of complex and specialized tools for niche tasks.
The founders of Harvey AI have assembled bingo from the correct elements are confirmed not only on paper, but also in practice. Since its founding in 2022, the startup has raised $206M in venture capital investment and achieved unicorn status last October. In 2024, Harvey's revenue reached $65.8M, up from $10M in 2023.
We talked about Harvey AI and other promising projects for 2025 in this post:
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Red Flags for AI Startups
While the interests of VCs are quite broad (and vary from firm to firm), there are a few common red flags. If you expect to raise investment for your startup, you should probably avoid the following business model and approach.
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