Devin Parekh, who has co-led the $90 billion investment firm Insight Partners for 26 years, spoke candidly at TechCrunch's StrictlyVC event in New York about the firm's deliberately diversified approach at a time when many venture capitalists are concentrating their bets on frontier AI labs such as OpenAI and Anthropic. Unlike more vocal rivals, Parekh said Insight prefers to let its portfolio results speak for themselves rather than courting attention on social media or podcasts, while acknowledging both the wins (stakes in Databricks, OpenAI and Anthropic) and the misses, such as losing out on AI legal-tech firm Legora.

Parekh argued that AI's benefits, including major advances in healthcare such as analysing 50 million patient records to flag disease risk, outweigh concerns about misuse, comparing the risks to those posed by other emerging technologies throughout history. On strategy, he explained that Insight's mix of early-stage, growth and buyout investing shifts fund by fund rather than following a fixed allocation, and that the firm has avoided major buyouts since 2024 due to high interest rates and weak exit multiples. He also noted that rapidly rising valuations, reminiscent of 2021, have pushed Insight to focus more on smaller early-stage bets, such as $20-25 million cheques, rather than large late-stage rounds where price increases are no longer matched by reduced risk.