CTalk
Funding “is not the goal. It’s the tool”: Disruptive AI on backing AI startups
At Mind the Tech London 2025, Yorai Fainmesser, General Partner at Disruptive AI, spoke to CTech about backing founders beyond funding and Israel’s place in the AI revolution.
Yorai Fainmesser
(Photo: LONDON FILMED)
“We established in 2021, when [it was] a lot of effort to explain what is AI, why it could be the driver of all scaling and everything to be created in the future,” said Yorai Fainmesser, General Partner at Disruptive AI.
Speaking to CTech at Mind the Tech London 2025, Fainmesser explained of the early-stage fund: “It was the first Israeli fund that is specialized and focused on AI investments, meaning that we bring to the founders tools and help and knowledge that will help them grow with AI.”
For Fainmesser, venture capital in AI isn’t just about money but about helping founders navigate a fast-changing market. He believes VCs have a responsibility to provide more than funding. “I serve two clients,” he explained. “One of them is the startup founders. And for them, backing is not only funding… funding is not the goal. It's the tool. The goal is to build a great company.”
In terms of a future outlook, Fainmesser described 2025 as a year when AI’s impact will deepen across industries. “The first industries to be transformed are the areas where you use a lot of text. So legal for sure… The second one… everything related to logistics and operation,” he said.
And for Israel specifically, he described its role in the AI race as advantageous in its ability to develop vertical solutions that tackle focused use cases, what he called the ‘plumbing’ behind the scenes. “What we are going to see are solutions that are going to be focused on a specific vertical, specific use case… This is the way Israeli thinks. We see a problem. We want to solve it, and we take everything into it very fast.”
You can watch the entire exchange in the video above.
