Insight Partners' Parekh: Why Diversify When VCs Pile Into OpenAI — SkimNews
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- Deven Parekh said Insight Partners ($90B AUM, on fund 13) is not overly concentrated, even as some funds pitch LPs on putting 35–40% of their entire fund into OpenAI or Anthropic
- OpenAI and Anthropic raised roughly half of all VC dollars in the first half of the year, per Parekh, who noted the firms stopped being able to dictate exclusivity once they needed to raise $30–100 billion
- Insight Partners owns positions in both OpenAI and Anthropic — once taboo in VC — because it came in at later stages and is not on either board, though it avoids Series A/B of direct competitors
- Insight Partners has not done a major buyout since 2024 because high rates and weak debt markets make software buyouts unattractive, and has instead returned more than $20 billion to LPs over the last two years through strategic sales and IPOs
- Parekh dismissed current AI doom concerns as overstated, betting instead on AI accelerating drug discovery and scaling healthcare, pointing to NYU Langone's ability to predict a 25% heart-attack risk from 50 million patient records
- Anthropic, OpenAI, and SpaceX could all go public within six to eight months at north of $1 trillion in market cap each, with Parekh noting Anthropic is already larger than Salesforce at four years old
- Insight Partners is still watching rather than investing in physical AI/robotics, which Parekh called 'largely science projects' that require betting on both whether and when adoption happens
Why it matters: With OpenAI and Anthropic absorbing roughly half of H1 VC dollars and some funds pitching 35–40% concentration in those two names, Parekh is betting that the long-arc VC playbook — diversification across funds, stages, and verticals — will outperform the AI-mania chase, a stance that matters most to LPs deciding whether to back concentrated funds or diversified ones like Insight.
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