Why Being AI-First is the Biggest Opportunity for Non-AI Startups to Raise Capital

AI obsession has reached such a fever pitch in venture capital that many non-AI founders are now hitting an invisible wall. They have strong products, great metrics, and solid teams. Yet, they may go to an investor meeting and walk out empty-handed — time after time. 

Why? To begin with, according to Crunchbase, in Q1 2025, 53% of global startup funding went to AI. And even within AI, capital is distributed unevenly: a sizable chunk of this money is going to behemoths like Anthropic and OpenAI. 

When we examine sector-specific numbers, the story appears to hold. Silicon Valley Bank reported that 45% of enterprise software investment went to AI companies, compared to just 9% in 2022. At the same time, investment in companies not actively leveraging AI remained flat.

This means that, in today’s market, if your business isn’t visibly taking advantage of AI, investors are likely to pass. This sentiment, however, doesn’t signify that the product is weak or that your company is doomed to fail, especially if you have strong fundamentals and proof of traction. 

The trick is to make AI a meaningful part of your value proposition — even if you’re a traditional manufacturing or B2B SaaS business. By focusing on integrating the tech to solidify your foundation, improve efficiency, accelerate growth, and build defensibility, you increase your odds of becoming visible to the AI-driven investor. To be clear, this isn’t about “AI-washing,” but about embedding AI where it genuinely moves margins, efficiency, or growth. This move will help you stand out in a market overflowing with strong entrepreneurs, where competing for attention and talent is hard — and coming up with a groundbreaking idea is even harder. 

By implementing this strategy, as a non-AI founder, you can break through even if the odds seem to be stacked against you. Here are some steps to follow. 

#1: Adopt an AI-first mindset

If your product isn’t inherently AI, you can still demonstrate how you’re leveraging the technology to create operational excellence and scale. Even traditional businesses, like window manufacturers, can credibly call themselves AI-first if they use AI in a way that positively impacts their operations and bottom line.

I firmly believe that in the next few years, we’ll be seeing way more traditional companies worth over $1B with a full-time staff of fewer than five employees, all thanks to AI. In line with this, you may be using AI-driven workflows to cut labor costs, bolstering your margins way above the industry average. Or, you may be running a lean engineering team — having a small handful of developers instead of 20 — by adopting AI-powered coding tools. A case study by the Boston Consulting Group mentions a biopharma company that, by leveraging AI for developing marketing content, saved over $80 million. 

Think about other ways in which you can incorporate AI, like improving a user’s experience or integrating predictive personalization. The point here is not to rebrand yourself entirely as an AI company per se, but to apply the technology where it delivers measurable impact, and then, to communicate that impact in terms that resonate with AI-focused investors. Also, do not confuse capitalizing on AI with building your own bespoke AI. What matters here is that you use existing AI tools as effectively as possible.

Even traditional, legacy organizations are following suit. For instance, International Airlines Group (IAG), the parent company of airlines like British Airways, Iberia, and Aer Lingus, has already appointed a Chief AI Scientist, who is responsible for implementing AI across the value chain, including an initiative for engine maintenance that aims to slash maintenance, repair, and overhaul expenses. Across the industry, annual expenditures in this category amount to $100 billion. 

#2: Map the path to AI transformation

Remember that investors don’t just back who you are now. They back who you can become. You don’t need to become an AI company overnight. Instead, you can outline how your current product positions you to become one tomorrow. 

In your pitch, describe how your sector is being reshaped by AI. Then, based on this, explain how early movers can get a tremendous advantage, and where you can see yourself in 2-5 years, assuming you capitalize on this opportunity. 

You can also leverage your existing base to illustrate why and how your current customers make an AI switch easier for you than for a new entrant. Show how they give you data, feedback loops, or distribution leverage that an emerging AI startup would have to spend years building. This will provide you with a concrete, actionable roadmap for integrating AI capabilities as they mature, and help you flip the usual narrative that incumbents can’t innovate. 

Ideally, you’d like this roadmap to outline three or four concrete ways AI will show up in your product over time, and tie each of them to a real business outcome. By doing this, you’re making your big AI vision attainable, and making your company more attractive to investors.

Imagine Shopify 2.0. If it were to appear, it wouldn’t be a tool that merely optimizes dynamic pricing or adds smarter marketing tools, but one where AI handles 95% of operations — fulfillment, customer support, inventory management — as if it were a team of 20 full-time employees. That’s the kind of seismic shift investors will lean forward for. Not incremental tweaks, but complete redefinitions of what scale looks like. 

Even large companies are adapting. Consider Microsoft. Once seen as a slow-moving incumbent, the company leaned on its deep enterprise base and distribution network to integrate AI at scale, embedding copilots into Office, Azure, and Dynamics. It wasn’t about inventing everything in-house, but about applying AI where it amplified existing strengths. This playbook demonstrates how even an established company can transform perception by weaving AI into every corner of its ecosystem. 

#3: Find investors who look beyond the hype

While so many funds chase the obvious AI plays such as LLM wrappers, infrastructure tools, or the fifth verticalized copilot this month, a handful of investors are quietly looking elsewhere. They’re not allergic to AI, but they know how to tune out the noise.

Think of it this way: when electricity was first invented and commercialized, some investors chose to sit on their capital, waiting until appliances appeared to make the technology indispensable. In the same way today, certain funds are less interested in the most apparent AI layers and more focused on where AI becomes embedded into real businesses.

With these kinds of investors, meaningful AI integration will win you points. If you can show that AI strengthens your margins, accelerates growth, or creates defensibility, you’ll have an edge over competitors who either ignore AI or bolt it on as an afterthought.

The savviest founders will seek out these contrarian investors, who have already seen a few cycles and are skeptical of hype. What these investors want is a clear story. Here’s what we’ve built, here’s how AI is making it better, and here’s how it makes us money and gets us all paid. 

Take, for example, a supply chain software company that’s been around for a few years, serving mid-market manufacturers. They’re not glamorous. But recently, they layered in a machine learning model to predict supplier delays using historic order data, weather patterns, and logistics hiccups. If a company like this can demonstrate how this AI layer cuts support tickets by, say, 20%, and shortens fulfillment times by X percentage, it can boost their fundraising prospects. 

Final thoughts

Times are hard for non-AI startups when it comes to fundraising. But it doesn’t have to be this way. Many of these companies have built something real and valuable. Something with revenue, actual users, and a tangible purpose. And if you’re one of these founders and are getting passed on, it is not because your idea is worthless, but because the market isn’t designed to notice it right now. What you need to do is make clear how your business fits into where the world is heading, and that is AI. 

By showing how AI makes what you’ve already built more efficient and scalable — improving your margins, strengthening your moat — you can sharpen your story into one investors can’t ignore, and that does your company justice.