Opinion
Everything got disrupted. Except the hard part.
In a world where founders can launch before their first board meeting, the only moat left is the one AI cannot build.
Unless you are curing cancer, the hard part in building a tech company was never the tech.
Not long ago, building a software company meant spending 2-3 years grinding through POCs and fundraising rounds before you saw first revenue. First revenue felt like a finish line.
Today, you can hit the $1 million ARR milestone before your first board meeting. You proudly walk into a Series A with a hockey stick growth chart and expect investors to throw money at you. And yes - you believe you are days away from buying a yacht.
This is where it gets interesting. The hard part was never the tech, and that tech moat is now dead.
Venture capital is deploying more funding than ever - $297 billion in Q1 2026 alone - but seed deal count dropped 31% year-over-year. There has never been more money in the market, and it has never been harder to raise. VCs can no longer know if they are looking at the next billion-dollar company or a crushed industry in Claude's next feature release.
Good founders were always looking beyond the horizon at the hundreds of millions, prioritizing competitive advantage and growth above anything else. AI just made it impossible to pretend otherwise.
Experienced founders - those who have already built companies and understand distribution challenges - stopped asking how to build it from scratch. They started asking who already has it.
Instead of raising money to hire salespeople and hoping they will sell something, they asked a different question: why build distribution when you can buy it? An experienced team can go from zero to $6-10M in existing ARR on day one, at a fraction of any sales team costs. They started mapping specific niches - industries with established players ready to be transformed. Companies that already have clients, trust, contracts, and recurring revenue, but are running on outdated tools, manual processes, and legacy thinking.
The model targets businesses that never had the chance to become great ones - run by founders who are hungry but have not yet jumped on the AI train, and are starting to feel the pressure of those who have.
The best of them get acquired.
Their client relationships, contracts, and untapped growth get unlocked by injecting AI directly into how they deliver - costs drop, capacity multiplies. Businesses that were grinding at 5% annual growth start moving at tech company speed. Founders stay in place and finally have the tools to become what they always wanted to build.
When done right, it happens again and again at scale - around one acquisition every two months.
But this only works if you are a true expert in the niche you are entering. Every acquisition feeds a flywheel: more client data sharpens the AI, more workflows get encoded, and sitting inside dozens of companies across the same industry gives you visibility into every market trend before it surfaces publicly - applied across your entire portfolio at once. That is how you become impossible to copy.
To execute this well, you need four things. Proven management experience to run multiple businesses at once. Deep domain expertise in the industry you are entering. AI that is proprietary and plug-and-play at both the company and portfolio level. And a financial infrastructure that can move as fast as the deals you find.
You might think it is a private equity play because of the financials - but what a PE firm does in 5 years, this model does in less than 2. And not a classic VC play either. This is a new asset class altogether: PE financials with VC tech-led growth. An opportunity that exists because of the fast-paced AI era we are living in, and the legacy businesses that are still being left behind.
The AI-enabled roll-up.
In 2025, General Catalyst committed billions to it and named the category, backing companies like Crescendo and Titan MSP. Thrive Capital and Bessemer are also in the game with companies like Crete PA. These are all successful AI roll-ups that crossed $100 million in revenue in their first year.
Then, OpenAI took an ownership stake in Thrive Holdings. Anthropic partnered with Blackstone to launch an AI-native enterprise services firm. The biggest funds are aggressively betting on who holds the data, the workflows, and the industries underneath them.
The signal is clear - VC theses require change and new GTM models are a must. Israel is positioned to lead this with our scaling expertise and unique tech talent.
The opportunity is now. Are you fast enough to take it?
Asaf Nevo, a second-time founder, is CEO of Cyblink - actively acquiring cybersecurity firms across the US and transforming them with proprietary AI.
