The AI Startup Fantasy Draft

This is probably my favorite episode of the year. We just updated our picks for our artificial intelligence startup fantasy draft. That means dropping startups whose star is fading and making new pickups.

Last year, Max Child, James Wilsterman, and I drafted the most promising generative AI startups that had raised $100 million or more. In this latest episode, we make some hard choices: cutting loose startups who have lost our favor, cashing in on early acquisitions, and pickup up some new startups. In the process, we weigh in on the buzziest AI startups.

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Catching You Up on Last Year’s Picks

To catch you up: here’s how last year’s draft went down. It started off with me taking on a $75 billion handicap for the right to pick first and draft OpenAI. We proceeded from there in a snake draft with Max picking second and James picking third. Here were the five companies we each drafted last year.

Last year’s picks

Eric

1. OpenAI

2. Inflection

3. Character.AI

4. Glean

5. Mistral AI

Max

1. Databricks

2. Pinecone

3. Cohere

4. Modular

5. Imbue

James

1. Hugging Face

2. Anthropic

3. AI21 Labs

4. Replit

5. Adept

Altogether on this week’s episode we collectively dropped three companies, exited three, and picked up twelve new startups.

I don’t want to spoil our picks so you’ll have to listen to the episode to find out what happened. (As a reminder, the goal here is to accumulate the most total value by November 1, 2028. We aren’t worried about the return on our investment just the final end state valuation.)

We’d love for you to weigh in in the comments with your own seven startup picks and give us your feedback on what you think of our draft decisions.

Give it a listen.