Industry Data

In 2025, AI is expected to significantly impact Venture Capital marketing platforms by automating many tasks, providing highly personalized outreach, identifying promising startups through advanced data analysis, and enabling more informed investment decisions through predictive analytics, ultimately giving VC firms a competitive edge in identifying and securing high-potential deals.

Sapphire: Top 10 AI Trends & Predictions for 2025: A Platform Shift in the Making

At the start of 2024, we felt it was clear that generative AI would remain a dominantforce in both technology and venture capital. The model layer continued to attract the most capital, fueled by the computational demands of leading labs. Categories like code assistance, marketing and customer support were also primed for accelerated growth and CapEx increased as hyperscalers engaged in an arms race to expand global computing capacity.

What we thought would happen in the world of AI in many cases did, but there were also quite a few surprises. Few anticipated that we wouldn’t have seen a GPT-5 class model by now or that several once-red-hot startups, which had raised hundreds of millions in capital, would see their founding teams quit and decamp to Big Tech. We also didn’t see the rise of personal AI assistants, new AI form factors threatening the smartphone’s position as the central device in users’ lives, deep-fake scandals wreaking havoc in global elections, a re-shuffling of global search market share or anything even remotely resembling AGI—as many were predicting heading into the year. Nor did many foresee that reasoning models would create massive excitement and unlock a new scaling law. While recognizing the direction of progress isn’t difficult, predicting the specific path–and the potential pitfalls–can be much more challenging. At Sapphire Ventures, our mission is to deeply study technology trends, form a perspective on how markets will evolve and back the entrepreneurs building towards that vision. With prediction season in full swing, we’re sharing some of our thoughts on the most significant themes shaping the near-term future of GenAI in the enterprise.

Here are our top 10 AI predictions for 2025:

• AI-native apps will see the strongest funding momentum
• Many more AI-native companies will reach $50M in ARR
• AI exits will increase, but M&As will trump IPOs
• Models will improve across multiple dimensions
• Agents will begin to deliver on hype, though impact will be uneven
• The DoD will double down on AI
• AI-generated content to surge with video becoming a rising star
• As consumption grows, outcome-based AI pricing models will be slow to ramp
• AI: A major security threat and antidote
• AI regulation will move slowly absent a major calamity