Elad Gil’s Latest AI Bet
Elad Gil, the prolific investor known for placing early bets on Airbnb and Stripe, says he’s been backing ventures buying mature businesses and incorporating artificial intelligence into their work. Now we know the identity of one of them.
Gil recently led a funding round in Enam Co., a one-year-old AI startup focusing on worker productivity, according to a person familiar with the deal. The investment valued it at more than $300 million, said that person and another person. Andreessen Horowitz and OpenAI’s Startup Fund are also investors in the company, according to their representatives.
Enam Co.’s website gives little indication of what it’s actually working on, but people familiar with its approach said it’s looking to buy companies and make them more efficient using AI. Zayd Enam, the startup’s eponymous founder, was previously CEO of customer service company Cresta. He indicated six months ago on Linkedin that his startup already had at least $10 million in revenue.
A spokesperson for Gil declined to comment. Enam also declined to comment on the fundraising, saying the company is “heads down right now building.”
Venture capitalists have been looking more like private equity investors of late, scouting for opportunities to refurbish relatively boring businesses such as accounting firms with the latest AI advances, as my colleague Natasha recently wrote. In that vein, Thrive Capital said last month it was starting a vehicle to buy and hold companies that can benefit from new technologies. General Catalyst and 8VC have pursued similar strategies.
Gil, who a few years back became the face of the solo venture capitalist movement, is often early to big trends in Silicon Valley. His interest in buyouts could be a signal for others to begin taking the concept more seriously.
Asked on a podcast last year about his interest in AI-driven buyouts, Gil said he had invested in two already and thought it could be the right approach in industries that are slow to adopt new software products or for which AI could bring down costs.
“Maybe what you do is you just buy some assets and roll them up and go after it,” Gil said. In addition to backing Enam Co., Gil helped start AI evaluations company Braintrust and in 2023 co-led an investment in legal AI startup Harvey that valued the company at $715 million.
For its part, Enam Co. says on its website it’s “on a mission to accelerate the future of work,” drawing inspiration from Ford’s innovation in assembly lines and Toyota’s production system. It has set up offices in the San Francisco Bay Area and Berlin, where it’s looking to hire technical staff. The company also has a side hustle selling hats bearing the slogan “Make AI Great Again.”
And while Enam Co.’s website doesn’t say much about its strategy, it does take a jab at another corner of the financial world: “We don’t wake up excited to make the world a harsher place—we are not private equity,” it says.