Jose Bethancourt

Artificio is building a deeptech startup in Peru. They're raising $7M. Its founder went to Harvard and MIT. Yet, fundraising isn't a piece of cake. They're stuck between two dilemmas. Here's how co-founder Arturo Deza (the Harvard/MIT one) explained it to The Realistic Optimist: "Artificio is an outsider for both LATAM VCs and for American VCs, but for two different reasons. For LATAM VCs, we’re a rare occurrence of a local deeptech startup. They don’t have many benchmarks to point to, and are thus frisky about investing. They don’t know how to value us. Things would be easier if we were doing food-delivery, in which case we could both point to Rappi and call it a day. Of course, Rappi is a spectacular company. But we’re building something very different. For American VCs, we’re a rare occurrence of a non-San Francisco based company building extremely advanced technology. To American VCs, if you’re not based in San Francisco, it means you lack ambition. Many don’t understand that the world has changed, and that Artificio is five steps ahead. We’re playing “4D Chess”. We are not the only ones crazy enough to do this: in other industries, many founders have decided to build outside of the US while still taking US-based VC funding (Mistral AI in France, NotCo in Chile…). They know that post-pandemic, newer markets and opportunities are emerging outside the US that no one else is seizing." Link to Arturo's full Realistic Optimist interview in the comments.

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The most salient narrative in tech today is the end of software. Public software companies have been pummeled, down 20%+ in the last 3 months. But I think the bear case rests on weak logic. There are 3 main categories of concern driving this narrative: 1. Vibe coding means businesses build their own software 2. AI automates away jobs, and seat licenses plummet 3. AI-native companies take share from legacy incumbents The first one doesn't hold up. The second is too important to dismiss casually, but lacks evidence thus far. The third strikes me as most threatening, but it, too, rests on a flawed logical foundation.   On rolling your own software, customers who choose to build almost always regret it. An internal IT team can build a CRM, but they can't maintain and improve it like a dedicated software company. Anthropic spending 8-figures on Workday for HR software shows that incumbent providers have more to offer than software skeptics realize.   Sure, there's a risk of AI automating away seats (and therefore seat licenses). But this creates opportunity for software incumbents to deliver AI-infused software that allows customers to do just that. Software vendors can easily shift to usage-based or other value-based pricing models. Relatedly, there's a larger fear that AI will trigger massive unemployment among knowledge workers. This deserves to be taken seriously. However, unemployment is currently quite low by historical standards, and current AI is beyond what most considered AGI a few years ago. I think the worriers here are moving the goalposts. The third concern--AI-native companies decimating software incumbents--is the most formidable. 20-25 years ago, Google hoovered up the attention economy by building the dominant consumer Internet product. Could Anthropic or OpenAI do something like this in b2b? It's not my base case, but it's the scenario that goes the farthest with me.   That said, I think there are 2 misunderstandings embedded here.   The first is that only AI startups can use AI tooling to accelerate product velocity. They aren't. The engineers at Shopify and Workday have the same access to Cursor, Claude Code, or open-source AI models.   The second, bigger misunderstanding is that these markets are zero-sum. By definition, technology expands the existing pie. So I disagree with the idea that AI growth will come at the cost of existing software companies. AI will massively expand software spend.   Which brings me to what's hardest to reconcile. If you believe AI-native startups will create major value, you're implicitly underwriting a world with fragmentation and switching costs among knowledge work tools. You can't hold that public software companies are all in the blast radius of Anthropic AND back the Harveys or Open Evidences of the world.   It doesn't add up, as the bull case of one is implicitly the bull case of the other. And while the market is voting like these are opposites, I expect the weighing machine to disagree.

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I spend my days analyzing YC batches. Here are 3 trends I'm betting on for 2026: 1. The "Boring AI" wave Forget flashy demos. The YC companies winning right now are applying AI to deeply unsexy industries: compliance, logistics, accounting. Less Twitter hype, more revenue. 2. Solo founders are back YC used to heavily favor teams. Now I'm seeing more solo founders get in and outperform. Why? AI tools let one exceptional person do what used to require three. 3. The "reverse brain drain" International founders are joining YC, learning the playbook, then going back to build in their home markets. This is creating a new generation of global companies with American ambition and local execution. What does this mean for investors? The best seed deals in 2026 won't look like the best seed deals from 2024. At Lobster Capital, we're positioned at the front of this pipeline. Every week on ycroaster.com, I review real YC applications to show what "good" looks like. Which trend surprises you most?

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