Idea Map
Areas we believe are particularly ripe for innovation.
Idea Map > SaaS
SaaS
Greylock has a rich history investing in software applications and partnering with founders on their distribution models — from tops-down enterprise sales to product- and community-led playbooks. Across every industry vertical, applications are becoming smarter, more approachable, and easier to integrate — with deeper workflows and proprietary data forming the foundation for tomorrow’s system-of-record companies. And with a new wave of LLM-based applications, SaaS companies have a generational opportunity to revamp verticals that have yet to be touched by software.
AI-enhanced sales prospecting
Rethinking the way SDRs find and qualify leads, through more predictive analysis of customer intent and using natural language to parse through large datasets. Intelligently orchestrate outbound across channels, and track successful customer trends.
Employee security training
Security teams need to constantly train their employee base on security best practices. AI can generate tailored content instantly, decreasing the long cycles of content creation + distribution security teams face. One can also further think of ways to serve learnings in-context as opposed to during mundane training sessions.
Accounting services copilot
Supercharge accounting services teams by using AI to automate repetitive workflows across research tasks, document requests to clients, importing and exporting data, and drafting client emails.
Next-gen process mining
Helping enterprise-scale companies understand pitfalls and gaps in their workflow processes, without having to deploy consultants to manually map and track actions. Multi-modal models will allow one to supercharge screen captures to actions.
Video analytics
Latest video models allow for more granular visual prompting across specific use cases, such as finding errors in factory lines, security functionality from home safety to schools or even large casinos. This newfound capability for prompting and targeted searching represents an unprecedented advancement in the realm of visual analysis, which we believe enterprises will make strong use of.
Code generation
The widespread adoption of in-IDE auto-complete, largely popularized by GitHub Co-Pilot, has sparked ongoing enthusiasm for products that build upon this concept. Simultaneously, an exciting opportunity emerges for a code-generating assistant that operates discreetly in the background, formulating comprehensive ‘remediation plans’ to address Jira tickets, empowering engineers to directly modify and approve these plans for implementation.
Idea Map > Marketplaces & Commerce
Marketplaces & Commerce
Greylock has a long history of early-stage partnership with networks & marketplaces across consumer and b2b domains. As former growth and product practitioners, we’ve long been obsessed with building levers to establish network effects businesses. These models can be very challenging to get off the ground, but when they work, they can really work. And these learnings compound – our early investments in iconic consumer marketplaces like Airbnb and Redfin yielded more recent investments in the current wave of B2B and labor marketplaces like Instawork or Inventa.
While marketplaces are one commerce business model we love, we are also excited to partner with application & infrastructure layer projects powering the next wave of consumer & b2b commerce. And just as AI will enable the next wave of service- and vertical marketplaces, we also believe AI will amplify new sales & marketing channels like Postscript with SMS, and accelerate adoption of B2B commerce solutions in older industries, like Pepper with foodservice.
AI-enabled services marketplace
We envision a next iteration of service marketplaces where humans will be augmented by AI to exchange technology-based services. Advancements in AI will unlock new creative, generative, and knowledge-based service categories that can be brokered by the next generation of AI services marketplaces.
Embedded ad networks
The proliferation of retail media networks (RMNs) and appetite for distribution of ad spend in a post-ATT/IDFA world requires programmatic management of ads across an increasingly fragmented set of channels. There is an opportunity for a demand-side platform (DSP) to help advertisers aggregate and manage advertising spend across a longer tail of networks.
Sustainable consumer commerce platform
Consumers are increasingly making sacrifices or paying premiums in an effort to be more climate conscious while businesses are quickly adopting carbon offset measurement practices and making commitments to reduce emissions. There is an opportunity for a platform to be the guiding resource for consumers wishing to live a more sustainable lifestyle.
Idea Map > Fintech & Crypto
Fintech & Crypto
Lending, borrowing, and investing remain time-consuming, opaque processes largely run by traditional banks. But the world of money is on the precipice of fundamental change. Powered by rapid advances in open banking, crypto, and generative AI, money is undergoing a digital transformation that will break open the $11 trillion of market cap trapped by legacy institutions. We believe the best solutions will be those built by developers with strong domain expertise who create tools with customers as the focal point.
Co-pilot for wealth managers
A copilot for wealth managers, assisting them in the day-to-day of data collection and summarization, portfolio management, and communication with clients. Such an assistant could help increase the scalability of a single wealth manager, and retain clients over time.
Bank enablement for RTP & FedNow
Software that enables banks and fintechs to adopt real time payment networks such as RTP and FedNow by providing tools such as real-time risk, fraud, and KYC/KYB.
Wise for stablecoins
A network that abstracts the complexity of crypto on-ramps and off-ramps so that fintechs, banks and corporations can use stablecoins for international money movement.
Idea Map > Consumer
Consumer
With AI poised to unlock new experiences in everything from social, media, and entertainment to health and wellness, we’ll see a plethora of AI-native consumer products offering innovative solutions and enduring value in ways that previously seemed impossible. We’re seeking founders with a bold vision of what’s missing in the world and a clear perspective about why it needs to exist.
Recommendation-based discovery for experiences and products
Redefine the way consumers discover activities, restaurants, and products leveraging recommendation-based content vs follow-based feeds. A compelling solution might re-invent old numerical ratings and focus on novel media. Simplicity, distillation, and curation are key elements as it is increasingly hard to capture your users’ undivided attention.
Collaborative, low-code, browser-based 3D design
Today 3D designs span an incredibly diverse and broad range of applications (movies, games, architecture) and the canvas/potential for 3D will increase along with advancements in compute. A new solution that focuses on browser-based, multiplayer 3D design can address high value use cases like open-ended immersive game worlds, social UGC mobile games,virtual reality.
Peer-based mental health solution
While the past decade in mental health has advanced telehealth-based models, we think the future is in peer-based models. Peer models have demonstrated efficacy with lower dependencies on the healthcare system. As a result, 50 states have recently passed laws in the past few years to require Medicaid to cover peer-based services, which can encompass novel models that might look like social support groups
Idea Map > Cybersecurity
Cybersecurity
The rise of AI will usher in a new era in cybersecurity. Bots, deep fakes, targeted attacks and ransomware are merely the beginning. In this environment, we believe there is a tremendous opportunity for innovative technologists to build companies designed to counteract the next wave of cyber threats. Greylock eagerly wants to help initiate and advance these efforts up and down the cyber stack.
Cloud-native SIEM
SIEM storage is extremely expensive with high ingress/egress costs.There’s an opportunity for a modern architecture to handle more data and advance security data lakes to the sophistication of Snowflake/Databricks, while using LLMs to improve the threat hunting side.
AI pentesting
Pentesting is done manually – AI can help do it repeatedly and at larger scale. AI at scale may also find some blindspots that humans miss, and also more accurately replicate the approaches offensive AI systems take.
Cloud + AI native managed detection and response
Many companies use expensive security services in lieu of or in addition to in-house teams, and MDR firms have not adopted cloud-native tools or AI to create leverage on their analysts time. Security services remain a massive market that can use AI to help scale threat analyst activities.
IoT/OT Security for government and critical infrastructure
There is an opportunity to secure the entire cyber-physical risk spectrum, across IT, OT, IoT, industrial IoT and physical environments. One can envision a secure engineered system that orchestrates sensing, computation, control, networking and analytics that interacts with the physical world.
Idea Map > Infrastructure
Infrastructure
From client-server and mobile-cloud to big data and AI, platform shifts have been the one constant in technology. Greylock supports the founders who provide the tools, databases, and overall infrastructure that enable these ground-shaking shifts. We work with our partners to ascertain not just product-market fit but also product-go-to-market fit — understanding that great technology paired with great distribution is necessary to build the category-defining companies of the future.
AI-driven IT remediation
A “systems of intelligence” for observability and root cause identification and remediation leveraging LLMs. Ingesting data from logs, metrics, alerts, and then using LLMs to build and execute runbooks.
Cloud native document database
Large opportunity in creating an alternative to Mongo Atlas that can act as the next generation operational database. Building on top of native cloud components and storage, decoupling compute and storage, and ensuring serverless scalability provides an opportunity to create the next generation here.
Virtualize GPUs for training
The GPU shortage is being felt by everyone in tech at the moment, with no end in sight for at least 18 months. There’s a large opportunity create a layer that can multi-tenant GPUs, separating training and inference from hardware.
