Valor “AI Startups in the South” Report Q3 2024
Valor Ventures is a VC based in Atlanta and leading seed rounds in B2B startups headquartered in the South. We’ve been investing in AI since 2017. Q3 YTD, Valor is tracking just under 400 AI startups in the South region, across 92 cities.
Valor leverages the largest database of emerging seed stage startups in the South. We use a traditional approach to sourcing through relationships and referrals. We accelerate our decision making process with Vic, our internal AI. Vic does web site scraping, deck scraping, high level analysis, and similar tasks to bring more data to each record. Long story short, when a startup enters our sourcing pipeline, there’s a multi-source record that builds over time through every conversation we have with the team.
Our YTD 2024 report for the third quarter only reports on AI startups Valor has met so far this year in this region, and does not dive into our multi-year data.
View AI STARTUPS IN THE SOUTH Q3 2024 Full Report PDF With Charts and List of Startups
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A note about this report, and this moment in time . . .
Like every massive tech wave before it, AI will create generational wealth for founders, early employees and the investors who back them. Going through data from hundreds of AI startups this year, we couldn’t help but be thrilled with the creativity coming from founders in this region.
That said, there are three things our region needs to do a better job of in order to optimize the time-sensitive opportunity AI is bringing our way:
- Local corporate leaders should prioritize getting to know, and rapidly piloting, early AI from local founders. This will help speed corporate transformation and widen the competitive moat for Fortune 500 companies headquartered in the fast-growing South. Having a “top 3 challenges” list at the ready to help funnel AI startups onto a specific pilot fast lane can help.
- Investors should consider making AI and VC part of their core alternatives strategy for the next cycle (1-5 years). The South has few local early stage VCs–but these firms are where the puck is right now. It takes local mentorship to help new entrepreneurs scale rapidly and not have to “invent the wheel” of company building while also building fundamental new software.
- Founders need to focus on centers of excellence, and making sure their technology is built in the mainstream of AI for global acceleration. It can be easy to be “heads down on customers” and ignore AI built on the coasts, in India, in Israel and beyond. Because AI is the fastest technology wave yet (for obvious reasons), it is not going to flow forward like other cycles, in quarters and years. The software that builds AI is also being built by AI, and so it’s developing faster. Founders need to be aware of this, and keep a (much) more aggressive competitive perspective as well as a “best of breed” approach in building resilient AI stacks.
-Lisa Calhoun