What top VCs want from AI founders: Inside the investor lens with Jon McNeill, Aileen Lee, and Steve Jang at TechCrunch Disrupt 2025 (techcrunch.com)

At TechCrunch Disrupt 2025 (Oct. 27–29, Moscone West) top VCs Jon McNeill (DVx), Aileen Lee (Cowboy Ventures) and Steve Jang (Kindred) will lay out what they now expect from AI founders — beyond glossy decks — in a market shaped by huge foundation-model providers and rapid commoditization. The conversation will focus on practical investor signals: demonstrable product-market fit, repeatable GTM, unit economics, defensibility through proprietary data, workflows or latency/cost optimizations, and a technical roadmap that shows meaningful ML-driven differentiation rather than superficial model rebrands. For the AI/ML community the session’s significance is twofold: it translates high-level investor concerns about “AI monopolies” into actionable startup priorities, and it highlights the technical levers that create durable value — vertical specialization, tight data-capture loops, model fine-tuning pipelines, MLOps and inference cost engineering, and customer-embedded integrations. Expect candid examples of what convinces VCs to write the check (growth signals, defensible data assets, team depth) and practical advice on positioning in crowded niches. Founders building scalable model infrastructure or domain-specific applications will come away with clear criteria investors use to separate short-term experiments from fundable, durable AI businesses.