Nine things we learned at the GCVI Summit 2025

The GCVI Summit in Monterey, California, was the biggest it has ever been this year, with more than 850 delegates packed into two intense days of talks, panels and one-to-one meetings. For those who couldn’t join us we’ve distilled some key highlights and learnings.

The three unspoken undercurrents of the Summit this year were the three Ds — Donald Trump, DeepSeek and defence. The new US president was seldom mentioned by name, but everyone referenced the uncertainty that his actions have introduced into the market. The emergence of DeepSeek in January, meanwhile, upset an investment thesis that assumed large language models could only be built with the backing of deep-pocketed US investors. And defence has become a hot topic of investment with input coming from all sorts of surprising sectors, including sports tech.

Here are some of the key things we learned:

1. Businesses have learned to use AI

A year ago at the GCVI Summit, all the talk was about the emergence of large language models to train AI, but corporates were still figuring out how to use AI for business. That gap between investment in AI and revenue generation is now closed.

Corporate investors are now seeing opportunities of AI in different sectors. Sagi Paz, global head of AMD Ventures, said that last year a lot of its investments were in AI platforms. In 2025, the focus is on choosing sectors where AI has an application, such as in life sciences and gaming. “I don’t see the market for AI slowing down. The size of the market will be huge,” said Paz on a panel. “The gap or disconnect between AI and revenue is closing.”

Jeffrey Li, managing partner at Tencent Investment, the investment arm of the Chinese gaming and entertainment company, said AI “is key for verticals”, such as improving efficiency in gaming production and entertainment technologies.

2. People are still learning how to live in an AI-dominated world

Another Summit highlight was the keynote by Jimmy Ba, founder of xAI, who talked of how a small team built Colossus — the AI supercomputer to train the large language model Grok — in just 19 days, a project that would take most other teams several years. Ba told us that “people are vectors” and that small teams where the vectors are all pointing in the same direction can move fast. Ba also told the audience that in two or three years’ time, a company wanting to set up a new business unit wouldn’t hire Stanford and MIT grads, but Grok.  

But as impressive as the Grok and Colossus speeds are, it was good to get a balancing view from author Esther Dyson, who countered that people are more than just vectors – they are multidimensional. Humans will need to live in the world we are creating. We must learn to use AI without being controlled by it.  

Andrew Ng, one of the original inventors of AI before it was known as AI, suggested everyone learn to code as a starting point and warned against laws that would restrict access to open source large language models. It would benefit a few large companies with proprietary AI models but slow innovation in the industry in general.  Export controls or preventing Americans from using a Chinese AI model like DeepSeek will only slow down American innovation.  

3. CVCs are embracing AI for investing

Corporate venture teams revealed they are using AI as part of their investment process, such as doing due diligence and understanding investment opportunities in different sectors.

Kei Onishi, CEO and managing director of Yamaha Motor Ventures, said his team has started to use AI to do due diligence on potential investments. The team has also used AI to research sectors it is not familiar with such as climate tech. “It can really help you get up to speed with sectors,” said Onishi.

Anila Joshi, part of AWS Generative AI Innovation Center, which has a $100m fund for investing in generative AI startups, says AI’s ability for automated reasoning means that venture teams can analyse how the technology has come up with conclusions, making it a valuable tool in helping ventures team make investment decisions.

4. Investors brush off Trump’s climate science bashing

Climate tech investors were bullish about the future of the sector despite the Trump administration questioning climate science and pushing for more oil and gas production.

Marc van der Berg, global managing director of ventures for Climate Investment, a climate tech fund with several oil and gas company limited partners, said the firm plans to launch a climate tech fund next month.

“The private capital market is as healthy as it has ever been,” said van der Berg. “Alright, we have a new administration in the US, but the problem is global. We have investments in Scandinavia, the UK, EU, South America and north of the border. We don’t underwrite to legislation or regulatory tailwinds.”

Steve Westly, founder of the Westly Group, a venture capital firm with multiple corporate limited partners, said that, barring the US, “the rest of the world is going full speed ahead towards renewable energy”.

5. Trump’s turbulence may shorten the IPO window

The US administration’s effect on the market was referenced obliquely by both Jack Cassel from Nasdaq and Eric Peña from NYSE as “turbulence” which would restrict the much-anticipated IPO window that was meant to open in 2025. We need at least one quarter of calm, Peña said, for conditions to become favourable for listings.  

Given that 2025 was meant to be the year that a long queue of businesses finally came to market, this is not great news. Lucky – or maybe not coincidental?– that we’ve seen many CVC units shift to focus more on strategic rather than financial goals in the past year.

6. Canada aims to stay sovereign and investable

Canada was flying the flag in a big way at the Summit as nationalism runs high given Trump’s threat to annex the country. Matt McLeod, head of AI investments at Global Affairs Canada, the consular and trade body, surveyed the Silicon Valley investor audience to see whether they were in favour of Canada becoming the 51st US state, with not a single hand going up.

Canadian representatives plugged the country’s investment opportunities for corporates, including the fact it ranks eighth in the world for unicorns. However, only 6% of large corporates have investment arms in Canada compared with 40% of US corporates. If Canadian CVC investment could reach the same level as the US, it would be a huge boost to the ecosystem.

7. Sports tech is a trillion-dollar ecosystem

Corporates are piling into sports tech innovation, which is estimated to be a trillion-dollar market. Sony Innovation Fund invests in sport tech as its parent partners with the majority of global sports leagues. Austin Noronha, managing director of Sony Innovation Fund, said the fund is interested in technologies that track the health of players and engage with different fan bases among many other applications.

Investors are also looking at dual use sports tech – for example, how technologies that monitor the health of athletes can also be used in the defence tech sector to track the health of miliary personnel, for example.  

8. Investing in defence is no longer “weird”

On defence, there were panels featuring the National Counterintelligence and Security Center and IQT, which invests on behalf of US security agencies. But perhaps this was most telling – when the Summit breaks down into the industry sector council discussions, it is usually the rooms for AI or energy that are most packed. This time the AI room was only half full, but the defence sector room had barely room for all the people wanting to squeeze in.

“It has become a lot less weird to invest in defence” since the Ukraine war, was one of the comments heard in the room.  

But despite the geopolitical anxiety that threaded its way into many conversations, most investors remained sanguine. Business is business and it should transcend politics. The tech tap isn’t about to be turned off, and software, I was told, “is like water, it always finds a way through”.  

9. Joby Aviation is a strategic success story for Toyota

Corporate investors are always looking for success stories that can illustrate the strategic benefits that CVC can bring to their corporate parents. It is often difficult to find good examples, however, so it is worth picking up this one that Joby Aviation shared at the GCVI Summit.

Bonny Simi, president of operations at the electric air taxi company, was an early investor in the company while she was at JetBlue Ventures, and later left JetBlue to take on a more hands-on role with Joby. Joby Aviation — which has a market valuation of $5bn compared with $2bn for JetBlue — became a great financial exit for JetBlue when it listed.

But an even bigger beneficiary from Joby was Toyota. Jim Adler of Toyota came on board as an early investor with two weeks’ notice (who says CVCs can’t be nimble?). The relationship with Joby has ended up being transformational for Toyota, helping its transition to being a much broader mobility company, while Toyota engineers are helping Joby scale up its manufacturing processes.