Sandhya Venkatachalam, who led early institutional investment in AI chipmaker Groq while at Social Capital, has raised a $52 million fund called Axiom Partners to back startups using AI in industries like construction, industrials, and insurance. In an interview with Crunchbase News, she said her approach deliberately accepts that many bets will fail. "I think that's what my investors are backing me to do: identify categories of the future, rather than participate in the categories everyone already recognizes," she said.
Axiom looks for what Venkatachalam calls "AI for the real world"—companies that deliver an outcome rather than another software tool. She said customers are increasingly paying from labor budgets, with contract values often in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. The firm also uses its own AI system, the "Axiom Brain," to track trends and speed up diligence.
On durability, Venkatachalam argued that startups become hard to replace when they handle the "last mile of the job"—integrating deeply with customer data, workflows, and systems. That is work large AI model companies often ignore. Her early Groq investment came after she traced Google's custom chip efforts to co-founder Jonathan Ross, a lesson in backing nonobvious teams in nonobvious categories.