Lightspeed Reaffirms Its Investment Strategy in Europe

Linzi Boyd
I'm here with Nicole at London Tech Week from Lightspeed Venture Partners. Thank you for joining me today.

Nicole
Thank you so much for having me.

Linzi Boyd

So I'd love to know, Nicole, what are the expectations for Lightspeed to go into Europe?

Nicole
So, at Lightspeed, we've actually been investing in Europe since 2010, but then in 2018, when we realised two of the five largest outcomes globally were in Europe, we decided it was really important for us to have boots on the ground. So we've now hired an amazing team, which have been here for about four years in not just London, but we also have Berlin, Paris, multiple offices, and so Lightspeed's doing a lot more, investing nearly a billion, actually, in Europe already, and it'll be a lot more.

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Supporting High-Growth Startups with AI Investment

Linzi Boyd
That is huge growth and incredible for the economy to scale via SMEs and startups and scaleups. So what would be your take?

What would be the key things that you might be saying to those businesses right now to be able to trade overseas?

Nicole
So for us at LightSpeed, we're heavily investing in AI at the moment, and so we're saying to those companies, if you're fast-growing, if you're a post-product market fit, then we really want to be speaking to you. And then on the AI side of things, we kind of break it down into AI-native and AI-enabled, and so we're investing at the LLM level. It's definitely at the application layer, and we're starting to see some really interesting companies built there. And it's the...

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The AI Application Layer: A Hotbed for Disruption

Linzi Boyd
Is there a key sector that is going at fast speed with the AI side of things?

Nicole
Honestly, all of it. But I'm most excited about the application layer right now because we really have made such huge developments on the infrastructure.

So now, we're ready for that disruption that can be seen through AI apps and AI App Store through OpenAI. Huge developments that's been happening recently with chat GPT-4 and it's going to be an AI travel agent, an AI financial planner, AI song generator like Suno. There's going to be a lot of developments.

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