Why the Next Trillion-Dollar Startup Won’t Be a Software Company
Leo Polovets, General Partner at Humba Ventures and co-founder of Susa Ventures, discusses why artificial intelligence is commoditizing software and shifting venture scale opportunities toward deep tech and physical hardware. Polovets explains how hardware companies scale differently than SaaS, addresses misconceptions about capital intensity, and breaks down the bottlenecks in AI data centers, energy, and semiconductors.
- Hyperscalers face physical ceilings across energy grids, permitting, and engineering, forcing them to value fast deployment over efficiency. Read →
- The traditional SaaS founding pair, splitting commercial duties and software engineering, breaks down in physical hardware and deep tech ventures. Read →
- Software revenue ramps smoothly, but physical hardware runs near zero for two to five years before spiking straight into tens of millions of dollars upon deployment. Read →
- Leo Polovets and Humba Ventures avoid early-stage humanoid robotics rounds despite predicting the category will produce a trillion-dollar winner. Read →
- Leo Polovets points to the classic pottery class experiment to explain deal calibration: volume drives pattern recognition, while limiting dealflow to one curated pitch a week leaves investors poorly calibrated. Read →