George BandarianAI Innovator & Venture Leader Driving Future Technologies

What Investors Actually Look For | Andrew Chen (a16z)

Name: What Investors Actually Look For | Andrew Chen (a16z)
Uploaded: 2026-03-26T17:30:00+00:00
Duration: 3 s
Channel: George Bandarian
Description: In this interview segment, George Bandarian and another speaker discuss what makes an AI startup attractive to investors, using Nexa as a concrete…

26 Mar 2026 · 0 min

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In this interview segment, George Bandarian and another speaker discuss what makes an AI startup attractive to investors, using Nexa as a concrete example. Bandarian outlines a two‑part AI investment thesis—agentic AI versus convergence AI—and explains that Nexa falls on the agentic side, targeting traditional, low‑AI‑adoption industries such as construction, mining, and lighting. The conversation highlights the importance of founder composition (a charismatic visionary sales leader, Philip, paired with a proven builder, David), early traction with industrial AI tooling, and pre‑existing customer contracts. The speakers note the high volume of applications per speed‑run cohort (hundreds to thousands) and reference Nexa’s recent $9 million seed round led by Construct Capital, which Andreessen Horowitz followed on. The overall tone is conversational and supportive, emphasizing the alignment between the investors’ thesis and Nexa’s early metrics.

you get hundreds, if not thousands of applications per speedrun cohort.
What jumped out and made you invest in Nexa? With Nexa, I think the most interesting thing with it was this is a company that by the time that they applied, they were already working on AI tooling for sort of industrial applications. And the most interesting thing with it is, is not only do you have Philip, who's just has already had a really significant career, exactly in the industry that he's going after, but he had already actually signed up a bunch of customers. So the good news is it was an early investment for us where when you were looking at the words versus numbers ratio, there's actually a lot of numbers already. Right.
I think what I would add to that from our side is our thesis in AI is centered around two parts. We have agentic AI and convergence AI, and obviously Nexa falls on the agentic side. What we look for is things founders that are going into traditional industries, you know, maybe the old school ones, the ones that are ripe for innovation that are not the early adopters of AI. We like the 2 or 3 co-founder combo. So great balance with the visionary sales charismatic Philip and the proven builder David. And from there, they're going after helping with the GenTech workflows in construction and mining and lighting and for the industrial engineers and the workflows and business processes in those areas. You had your last demo day, you put them first. It was Philip's birthday. He kicked it off really great. They went on to raise a seed round, I think $9 million led by Construct Capital. We followed on, you followed on.