Building An AI-Infra Startup In 2025: Seed-Stage Lessons From Pipeshift

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An Operator's Blog - with Soumitra Sharma

Soumitra Sharma

26 episodes

6 days ago

An Operator's Blog is hosted by Soumitra Sharma, General Partner at Operators Studio, a micro-VC firm focused on the US-India corridor. This podcast takes you into the world of startups and venture capital, featuring candid conversations focusing on sharing real operating insights, tips, and playbooks that you can immediately start using to solve your biggest challenges as a founder and operator. Join Soumitra as he cuts through the BS & interviews top founders, operators, and investors who have built businesses in the trenches for decades.

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Building An AI-Infra Startup In 2025: Seed-Stage Lessons From Pipeshift

An Operator's Blog - with Soumitra Sharma

1 hour 7 minutes 44 seconds

1 month ago

Building An AI-Infra Startup In 2025: Seed-Stage Lessons From Pipeshift

This episode delves in-depth into the present market landscape, challenges & opportunities being navigated by AI infra startups in the Bay Area.

We cover everything from parts of the AI ecosystem that are overhyped and underhyped, real AI infra pain points & apprehensions of enterprise customers, nuances of leveraging closed source vs open source models in enterprise infra, discovering gaps & wedges as a startup, creating differentiated products against competition, AI-first GTM, new-age pricing models and finally, lesser-known aspects of fundraising in the Bay Area.

Joining me for this discussion is Arko, Co-founder and CEO of Pipeshift, a YC-backed startup that's building reliable and SLA-compliant inference-as-a-service for real-time AI applications in production. He and his co-founders started building products together as undergraduates, participating in hackathons over six years ago, and today they are building a best-in-class AI infrastructure company right here in the Bay Area.

TIME STAMPS:

(01:43) What parts of the AI ecosystem are under-hyped?

(07:48) The Pipeshift backstory

(11:23) The unique value of building in the Bay Area

(16:31) Choosing the right problem statements

(21:34) Competition & differentiation

(25:22) AI infra pain points of enterprise customers today

(32:24) Staying on top of rapid changes in the foundational model layer

(42:48) Customer approach on closed vs open source models

(48:02) Ground reality of AI-first pricing models

(51:44) Early stage GTM learnings in AI infra

(59:55) Bay Area fundraising advice

Connect with Arko - https://www.linkedin.com/in/arkoc/

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Check out "An Operator's Blog" (https://operator.blog/) for weekly posts on Startups, Investing, and Life.

I am a venture investor focused on the US-India corridor. Feel free to reach out on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/soumitrasharma5/) and follow me on X (@soumitra_sharma).