Kristin Myers: Now, artificial intelligence may live in the cloud, but building it requires a lot of things in the physical world. Things like chips, data centers, power, robotics, and the infrastructure to connect all of it.
Now, that is creating an investment boom that extends far beyond chatbots and software, and it's also creating a new question for investors: Which companies can actually scale from a great idea into a great business?
Zenetta Burger is a partner at venture capital firm Giant Ventures, where she leads the firm's U.S. investing.
Now, Giant backs frontier technology across energy, infrastructure, healthcare, and industry, from the earliest stages all the way through growth.
So where is the next generation of category-defining companies being built?
Well, the road from an idea to the Stock Exchange starts right now.
AI is creating billion-dollar companies almost overnight. But there's a catch.
All that intelligence needs enormous amounts of power, and for investors, that could create an entirely new generation of winners.
Zenetta Burger is a partner at Giant Ventures, where she leads the firm's American investing, backing technologies across energy, infrastructure, healthcare, and industry.
And Giant is placing some big bets.
Its portfolio includes companies like Carbon Robotics, Efficient Computer, and cybersecurity unicorn Cyera.
But picking a promising startup is only the beginning.
The real challenge is turning breakthrough technology into a company that can scale from seed all the way to the public markets.
So here's the billion-dollar question: As AI reshapes the economy and its appetite for power creates entirely new markets, where is the smart money going next?
And which startups could become tomorrow's public market giants?
From Startup to Stock Exchange, Zenetta Burger is next.
And joining us now here at the desk is Zenetta Burger, partner at Giant Ventures.
Zenetta, thank you so much for joining us.
Zenetta Burger: Thank you for having me. This is great.
Kristin Myers: And based on your accent, it sounds like you've come all the way across the pond, but not necessarily today, since you do lead the firm's U.S. investing.
So talk us through this.
You invest in companies at a variety of different stages. Now, when you meet a founder when they're at the seed stage, what tells you that this could eventually, maybe one day, become a public company?
I mean, it's the billion-dollar question, right? In this case, actually the billion-dollar question.
Zenetta Burger: Absolutely.
We meet founders at various stages in their journeys.
You know, at the very, very earliest stages, we're looking for someone who has a view on the future.
Look, Giant is thinking about the next 10 years. We're thinking about a post-AGI world.
If you're pitching us something that sounds like yesterday, yeah, we're going to struggle to get excited about that.
We need to have a picture of the future laid out to us and some specific, unique insights.
That's when we look for founder-market fit. Maybe someone who's been in this industry and understands some nuance about it that tells us, like, this is where there really is an opportunity as this market shifts.
Sometimes it takes an outsider to see what the market could be.
But really, we're looking for that exceptionalism, real irrational ambition.
I think that that is something that's so hard to quantify.
I think a lot of VCs talk about this, but really thinking about what it is, and we'll get pretty personal with these founders, right?
What is it about them that really drives them to do something that is incredibly hard?
You know, 99% of these businesses fail.
What is it about this person that's going to make them absolutely sort of run through walls and become, like, the next, you know, hopefully billion-dollar founder?
Kristin Myers: So a great technology doesn't automatically become, you know, a great business.
So what usually breaks, right, as a company goes from actually, you know, two or three employees to a couple hundred employees as they really grow in scale?
Zenetta Burger: You know, it can be so many different things.
Unfortunately, there's no, like, cookie-cutter answer: avoid X or Y.
Sometimes, I mean, in this market, we're seeing people raise so much money that makes you think it's an anointed winner. And sometimes even raising the money is the reason they break.
There can be reasons around the team. There can be reasons around the market shifting. There can be competitive pressures. There can be, you know, a change in financing structure.
And all of these things are pitfalls we hope to sort of avoid and back the kind of founder who will see around these corners and mitigate as they happen.
Because there's so much out of the control of the founder. There's so much out of control of the board. There's so much out of control of anyone touching the business.
But we want to back teams that know how to mitigate that and pivot as markets change.
Kristin Myers: So there's the common saying, right, that what got you here isn't always what's going to get you there.
And that can sometimes include the founder, the leader of the company.
So what is it about, you know, the qualities that make a great founder at that seed stage that might not necessarily make them the right person to bring that company to the public market?
Zenetta Burger: Yeah. Look, we look for grit.
And that can be someone who can see a business right through to the end.
We know many incredible entrepreneurs like this, right? Like, many of our sort of more controversial founders maybe fit this bill very well.
But I would say there's also a self-awareness that we look for.
Are you good at coaching? Can you take feedback well and then implement that?
I would say that some of our founders have come to that realization on their own.
We would never be the deciding factor there, but coaching founders and realizing where they're feeling strain.
And then maybe, you know, they realize themselves that there's a bigger and better opportunity with the right kind of leader, especially as the business changes over time.
And that's not always at the beginning. It's not always at the end. It's sometimes in the middle. It changes over time.
But we look for that self-awareness, for sure.
Kristin Myers: Now, at the beginning, you were saying that, you know, Giant isn't looking for the companies of yesterday. They're looking for the companies of tomorrow.
And you're really thinking in terms of decades, right, in terms of your vision.
So how do you know when you need to be patient, that the company is really building out this technology, it might need capital, it might need the market to also get on board, and when it's like, yeah, this just actually isn't working anymore and we need to really pull out?
Zenetta Burger: You know, we are in a high-risk, high-reward category.
Unfortunately, that comes with a lot of failures.
Our founders know that. Our investors know that. The LPs that invest in Giant know that we're on the fringe of risk.
We're really, like, going for it or going home.
And so, you know, very frequently we'll have companies shut down naturally as the market shifts below them.
And sometimes they've just grown too fast and really tried to go for something, and they just can't meet that commercial traction that really elevates them to the next level.
However, you know, as we think about the next 10 years, there are obviously market changes that are unforeseeable, or new opportunities emerge.
And sometimes those businesses pivot into something completely different.
Sometimes they get acquired by another business that can then take on their technology and scale that.
It's not one-size-fits-all.
We like to see these founders through and really work closely with them so that as they need their next funding requirements, we can continue to really feel their vision.
In some cases, we are very attracted to super technical founders, and in some cases, at the very early stages, we have to be super patient.
You're right. This is, like, going to take, you know, more than three or four years before they even realize, you know, economics, never mind commercial scale.
And that can seem kind of dizzying from the outside.
But we enjoy that challenge. We're up for it.
And then we know the second they have an unlock in that technology that really speaks to the market, then we can scale them.
We also invest at the growth stages, and at that point we're taking less scientific risk, a little bit of technical and engineering risk.
But typically we want to see that, you know, they've now proven their commercial scale, and this is just the execution phase.
So we think about both sides of the market that way: very early, very risky, and then a little bit more on the runway to success.
Kristin Myers: So let me ask you this because I want to know about the actual market right now, especially for some of this technology.
Because you guys have backed companies in robotics and chips, cybersecurity.
Now, I have here Carbon Robotics is one of them. So is Efficient Computer. Cyera, that's another one.
I believe it's pronounced Cyera?
Zenetta Burger: Cyera, correct.
Kristin Myers: Then correct me if I'm wrong, but what do those sort of companies tell us really about the marketplace right now and where a lot of the biggest opportunities exist?
Zenetta Burger: Yeah, I mean, I'll take Carbon Robotics as an example.
AI is so polarizing right now.
This is an example of an incredible business that's touching and affecting lives today.
Farmers, as it turns out, are far more entrepreneurial than you would expect. They're way more open to technology.
In this case, the business is a robot that kills weeds with lasers.
That means that we no longer need herbicides for these organic crops, and the tractor will go through the field.
The AI will determine what is a weed and what is a plant, and then efficiently and very sustainably go through these fields and kill these weeds.
So it's an amazing story for these farmers. They see the ROI, the return on investment, almost immediately.
And that's the kind of thing that gets us excited.
This is a category that's really not been touched by a lot of technology, and this business is really winning, but creating real solutions for everyday people.
That's an awesome sort of story for this generation of AI and what's possible in physical AI.
Cyera, I mean, I could go on about this business as well for hours.
We're living in this moment where agents have access to everything in your system.
So you and I, in our organizations, a typical person will only access 5% of what they have, or they'll use 5% of what they actually have access to in an organization, right?
Agents, 100%, right?
That's suddenly very scary for every company around the world because they don't know what they have access to.
So Cyera is really protecting these businesses at a rapid pace.
I mean, we just saw Anthropic [unclear in original transcript], and every Fortune 100 CEO is waking up to the fact that we're at a critical risk stage.
For us, we think about that for infrastructure and healthcare institutions.
If patient data leaks, you know, like, these things are really serious. They have everyday impacts.
And Cyera is the absolute winner who is sort of securing this. This is a cybersecurity company.
Efficient Computer, another one I could talk about literally all day.
So, this company, this chip that they've designed, it's a CMU spinout, Carnegie Mellon.
They developed it there over 10 years with this idea that, like, why are chips so energy-intensive? What is it about them? How are they designed?
And they broke that apart from first principles and have created a net-new chip that's, at the low end, 37 times more energy-efficient, at the high end, 100 times more energy-efficient than [unclear in original transcript].
Super critical.
Kristin Myers: Now, for the first wave of the AI boom, most of the attention was on the software, the models, the chatbots, the applications.
But artificial intelligence does not exist in a vacuum.
It needs chips to run, data centers to house them, electricity to power them, and increasingly, machines and robots to bring AI into the physical world, as Zenetta was just describing.
So that means the AI boom is starting to collide with some of the oldest parts of the economy: energy, infrastructure, manufacturing, and agriculture.
And that could create an entirely different set of winners.
Because the next big AI company may not build a chatbot, but it may build the infrastructure that makes the AI economy possible.
We're back now with Zenetta Burger, partner at Giant Ventures.
Okay, so let's talk a little bit about the bottleneck, AI compute, as it is called.
Everyone wants more data centers, but they all need more power.
You were just talking about that sort of energy and that power efficiency, how incredibly important that is.
Is this one of the biggest constraints, the energy question, to how fast AI can really grow going forward?
Zenetta Burger: For sure.
I mean, it's either going to be a speed inhibitor or extremely expensive.
I will tell you that this AI boom, the good news for people listening is that it will be the push that we need to a new energy infrastructure.
The demand is just so intense that, for the first time, teams that have been working on really new, novel energy technologies, and some of them for decades, are now seeing the commercial response that they needed to scale these businesses.
And this demand is pulling some new renewable energy sources, nuclear energy sources, you know, a whole array of new energy sources to the grid.
First of all, it's also enabling the grid to be more effective.
And every day we look at these new businesses and get more and more excited that this is going to revolutionize the way that we think about energy.
Historically, Giant, we've invested in a battery company. We've invested in a nuclear SMR, a small modular reactor, that is perfectly suited to powering not only data centers, also some of our biggest retailers around the world.
And that is portable, clean, and super effective in this sort of energy-transition era.
Kristin Myers: So talk to me about then, when it comes to the energy, what do you see going forward as the most, you know, viable, especially considering this sort of AI buildout?
You just mentioned the SMRs, the nuclear SMRs.
Is it nuclear, though? Is it geothermal? Or is it something else?
I mean, because everyone seems to be running in this energy race.
What do you think is going to be the winner?
Zenetta Burger: Honestly, the truth is there's such intense demand, there's going to be multiple winners.
We think that we've picked the one that we feel most strongly has a sustainable business model in nuclear.
We've chosen the one that we think has the most sustainable business model in the battery sector.
We've looked at a lot of geothermal. We've looked at a huge array of businesses.
And I think what our sort of main perspective is, is that the demand is now.
The speed-to-power need is now.
Who can get to market fastest? Who can solve real problems today?
And that's where we get excited.
So the fact that we've invested in certain categories certainly doesn't discount the others.
We're not choosing one category winner over the other.
Maybe there are some future energy sources like fusion that may come to market, and once they're commercially viable, we may invest in that category as well.
Kristin Myers: Okay, so say more about that speed to power.
Because what's stopping me, if I decide I want to build a data center, right, from just, I guess, plugging right into the grid?
Zenetta Burger: There are a number of bottlenecks.
I mean, communities, first of all, are very wary about data centers pulling from their grids.
So essentially, most of the data centers you're developing today are trying to build their own off-grid solutions: solar, nuclear, sometimes geothermal, and suddenly leveraging batteries.
Then there are other bottlenecks.
There are things called solid-state transformers that need to actually effectively power that AC/DC conversion within a data center.
I'm not going to get too technical. This is, like, going to bore people to sleep.
Kristin Myers: But AC/DC, I remember this from my science class days.
Zenetta Burger: There's a ton of opportunity, basically.
We're looking for those moments where value could be captured for our fund, for our investors.
But there's this moment where we can really think about this broken grid that was developed, you know, hundreds of years ago.
And we get to be more effective at redesigning because there's such demand.
Kristin Myers: So I have to ask the question that a lot of investors have been asking around AI, which is if we are in a bubble right now.
And so how do you know, as you guys are looking at a lot of these companies and investors are thinking about the fact that they want exposure, how to know that they're really in the midst of this sort of generational shift or actually at the top of the bubble?
Zenetta Burger: I mean, the annoying thing is two things can be true at the same time, right?
Yes, we're in a bubble.
Kristin Myers: You heard it here.
Zenetta Burger: Prices are incredibly inflated.
That doesn't mean that every company is not well-valued.
I think that the opportunity going forward is still, we've not even scratched the surface.
And so if you're making the right choices in the right companies, there's still endless runway.
The areas that we want to develop leveraging AI, we have a company that is pretty early in the innings of their commercialization, but the vision is, you know, a 50-year generational company.
They are leveraging AI models, or building their own AI models, to develop new material science.
So we sit at a plastic desk because that was a durable technology that was developed 60 years ago.
But maybe there are better polymers to put together and build more sustainable materials, leveraging the manufacturing that we have today.
These are things that would have taken a human data set, you know, decades to develop alone.
And AI can figure that out very, very fast.
And these businesses still have 50 years ahead of them of development and growth and understanding.
And so we've barely scratched the surface in many categories.
However, the market has been pretty exuberant.
And there are a lot of copycat companies. There's a ton of businesses being sort of overvalued. There's a lot of irrational money being thrown around.
We try very hard to be diligent in the midst of all this noise.
But those two things can be true at the same time.
Kristin Myers: So if you're an investor that's watching this, because part of this is really to chat about companies that an investor should get excited about before they even hit the public market.
So I'm curious, since we are on the floor of the Stock Exchange, right, companies come here every single day and ring that bell that is behind us.
What are the companies that investors should start paying attention to that might not ring that bell for another five or 10 years?
Where are those opportunities? Or where are you thinking that investors should really be paying attention to, at least thematically, if not specific?
Zenetta Burger: Yeah, I mean, I think that the geopolitical situation means that anything reshoring in the United States and developing where we have bottlenecks in supply chains, definitely something everyone should be paying attention to.
That's not going to change as geopolitical tensions change over time.
We still need supply chains for critical infrastructure components here in the U.S., whether that's batteries, whether that's pharma.
All of those categories we're taking very seriously.
We cannot be dependent on Asia for critical minerals.
It's just not something that is viable long-term.
And it's not only for America.
You know, European companies and countries want their supply chains diversified.
We saw what happened in COVID. Everyone suddenly realized you can't have these crazy bottlenecks.
Anything in that space we're paying attention to.
I think that there's also a lot of noise around AI in the typical sectors.
But again, there are so many industries that are barely being scratched by the surface.
So agriculture, mining, you know, heavy industry, manufacturing.
All of those industries we're looking at and seeing how AI can really make them more efficient.
That's better for the economy. That's better for those businesses. That's better for, you know, even just sustainability, to be more efficient across the board.
Kristin Myers: You know, we started off this conversation talking about how Giant really looks at a lot of the companies, evaluates the founders, and you were kind of running through a list of some of the things that you guys are looking for.
I'm curious to know how much storytelling is also, how important that is as well for some of these companies and also their success.
Zenetta Burger: Yeah, at the early stages, it's imperative.
A founder needs to lay out a version of the future that gets us excited.
And also, candidly, like other investors along the way, we need to know.
We know when we're investing that the business isn't in a perfect state yet, but we'd like to hear that vision in a way that's super well-articulated.
You could call that storytelling, and I don't mean that in a negative, sort of fraudulent way.
It's really just, like, laying out the vision, knowing that we all know that's not quite developed yet.
At the later stages, obviously coming into public markets now, you have to get the attention of a whole different category of investors.
And again, our companies' storytelling changes.
At this point, what makes this not just a sustainable growth business, but a generational company going forward?
And we try and sort of help our companies flex that muscle and understand the importance of that narrative.
But it does change over time.
Kristin Myers: Really quickly for you, Zenetta, if you are an investor, because for a while we saw a lot of, had like a unicorn IPO parade coming out, and valuations seemed to be disconnected from reality.
So if you are an investor and a company decides to go and ring that bell and is going public, what do you think, as a professional investor, right, that a retail investor should really look out for before they decide to back a company that's going public?
Zenetta Burger: Yeah. I mean, look, if I was a public markets investor, I'd be making different decisions. I'd be a different category of investor.
So I don't want to speak to specific companies that are going out now.
However, I think that, like, sticking to the fundamentals is always important.
But as we've seen with companies like SpaceX, as we've seen with companies like Apple and Google when they went public, you know, the retail investors at the time really couldn't believe that story had venture-type growth.
It's sort of breaking yourself outside of your current thinking and thinking about what the future could look like today.
That's more important than ever because the world is changing way faster than we ever thought imaginable.
And so breaking out of the specific parameters of thinking, it's, we call it layering your bias or layering on top of your biases, sort of understanding what the future and what's possible.
I think now, more than ever, is the time for really creative investors.
Kristin Myers: All right. Thank you so much.
Zenetta Burger, partner at Giant Ventures. Thank you so much for joining us today.
