Elad Gil Reveals Which AI Markets Are Dominated — and Where Startups Still Have a Chance
Solo venture capitalist and prominent tech investor Elad Gil says artificial intelligence remains one of the most unpredictable booms in technology history. Speaking at TechCrunch Disrupt 2025, Gil noted that while some AI markets are already dominated by clear winners, vast areas of the sector remain open for innovation and disruption.
Gil, who has invested in nearly every major tech success story of the past decade, was among the early believers in generative AI. After witnessing the huge leap between OpenAI’s GPT-2 in 2019 and GPT-3 in 2021, he began backing companies that built on large language models. His portfolio includes major names like OpenAI, Mistral, Perplexity, Character.ai, Decagon, and Abridge. But as foundational model capabilities surged between 2024 and 2025, Gil says predicting AI’s trajectory became harder than ever.
“AI is the one market where the more I learn, the less I know,” Gil admitted. However, he also believes some winners are now cementing their dominance. He points to foundational model developers—Google, Anthropic, OpenAI, xAI, Meta, and Mistral—as the key players likely to lead the field. He also highlighted AI-assisted coding as another market nearing saturation, with startups like Anysphere’s Cursor and Cognition’s Devin (which recently acquired Windsurf) already far ahead of the competition.
Gil also sees markets like medical transcription and customer support as largely spoken for. Startups like Abridge and Decagon are emerging as front-runners, while big incumbents such as Salesforce and HubSpot are rapidly integrating AI into their platforms. Yet not all fields are settled. He believes AI in finance, accounting, and cybersecurity remains wide open—areas where new startups can still emerge as winners.
Despite the rush of enterprise interest in AI, Gil cautioned investors and founders to look beyond early growth. He explained that corporate enthusiasm can generate misleading short-term spikes in revenue. “There’s false signal, and then there’s stuff that is just working,” Gil said, naming legal AI startup Harvey as one that’s clearly working, having surged from a $3 billion to $8 billion valuation in 2025 alone.
source: techcrunch