AI startups face a different set of challenges from your typical SaaS company. That was the message from Rudina Seseri, founder and managing partner at Glasswing Ventures, last week at the TechCrunch Early Stage event in Boston.

Seseri made it clear that just because you connect to some AI APIs, it doesn’t make you an AI company. “And by AI-native I don’t mean you’re slapping a shiny wrapper with some call to OpenAI or Anthropic with a user interface that’s human-like and you’re an AI company,” Seseri said. “I mean when you truly have algorithms and data at the core and part of the value creation that you are delivering.”