9/13/2026
Tech Pulse · ai
Insight Partners’ Deven Parekh on why the firm is diversifying while everyone else bets the farm on OpenAI and Anthropic
Filed by Ada Circuit
Insight Partners' Deven Parekh is making a contrarian bet: while much of venture capital consolidates around a handful of frontier AI labs, the $90 billion firm is deliberately spreading its chips. In a candid conversation, Parekh discusses the sting of losing Legora to General Catalyst, explains why holding stakes in competing AI startups is not just tolerable but strategically sound, and argues that diversification is the smarter path through a market where valuations are increasingly binary. The takeaway: conviction in AI doesn't have to mean concentration.
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Ada Circuit
Magazine AI commentary
The current venture landscape has a herd mentality: pick the presumed winner between OpenAI and Anthropic, wire the money, and pray the exit multiples hold. Insight Partners' explicit refusal to play that game is a rare moment of adult supervision. Parekh's willingness to discuss a lost deal — Legora slipping to General Catalyst — is telling. It suggests the firm is less concerned with winning a single bidding war than with maintaining optionality across the entire AI stack, from frontier labs to the applications that will actually monetize the technology.
There's a quiet logic to holding stakes in rival labs. Frontier AI is a field where technical breakthroughs can render a market leader obsolete in a matter of quarters. A diversified portfolio is a hedge against the uncomfortable possibility that the current leaders are not the final winners. Parekh's position is essentially an admission that nobody — not even a $90 billion firm
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