The core message of the session was that investors should not simply follow capital into the most crowded AI opportunities, but should return to venture’s job of finding “the non obvious ones” before consensus forms. The moderator framed the discussion against a market marked by mega seed rounds, hyper-concentration of capital, high valuations, and concerns that AI investing may have become a hype market. Alex Ilic of the ETH Zurich AI Center then introduced the panel from an explicitly AI-heavy vantage point: ETH Zurich’s AI Center has 1,500 researchers, 140 professors, and around 25 to 35 startups per year, with deep work in compute, foundation models, and frontier AI. The opening question to investors was deliberately simple: is anything hot beyond AI today?

Antoine from Felix Capital answered that there is significant opportunity outside pure AI-native plays, using healthcare as the first example. He pointed to Lilly’s recent scale, saying it reported 47 billion dollars of revenue in the last six months, with more than 20 billion dollars coming from GLP-1s focused on weight loss. He also cited Felix portfolio company VOY in Germany, expected to surpass a billion dollars of ARR by year end, as an example where AI can enable the business but the ultimate value comes from delivering a physical product and service to patients. He added fintech as another overlooked area, highlighting Revolut’s rise to a valuation above 100 billion dollars and attributing its success to founder quality and product-centric obsession, not to being AI-native from inception.

Anna from GIZ shifted the lens from sectors to regions, arguing that Sub-Saharan Africa deserves far more investor attention. She cited 13 of the 20 fastest-growing global economies being on the African continent, IMF projections showing Africa ahead of other regions this year and next, and the demographic fact that by 2050 every fourth person on the planet will come from Africa. She also emphasized resources: 60% of global solar energy potential in Sub-Saharan Africa, plus large shares of critical inputs such as platinum and manganese. Her third argument was innovation and leapfrogging, illustrated by M-Pesa, Paystack’s acquisition by Stripe, and BioNTech’s acquisition of African AI player Instadeep. The mismatch she highlighted was stark: only around 1% or 2% of global VC went into Africa last year despite this opportunity set.

Yusuf from QED Investors reinforced Africa as an overlooked geography through QED’s investment in Nigerian company Moneypoint, then argued that lending remains underappreciated. He connected QED’s Capital One roots to Nubank, describing Nubank as one of QED’s earliest deals and a Brazilian lender now worth roughly the same as Capital One. Fabian from HV Capital closed the excerpt by reframing the AI opportunity around bottlenecks: if intelligence becomes abundant, cheap, and eventually “free,” investors should look at compute, energy, raw materials, certification and trust, customer access, non-scrapable physical data, and the physical world itself. His practical conclusion was that production capacity, hardware-enabled models, critical minerals, defense, and physical AI infrastructure may become strategically valuable as intelligence commoditizes.