Venture & Growth Banking – Insights: Lazard VGB AI Infra 40

We are delighted to introduce the Lazard VGB AI Infra 40 which showcases a selection of some of the most exciting growth-stage AI infrastructure companies we have identified through hundreds of discussions with companies and investors.

Advances in Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) and Machine Learning (ML) have the potential to add significant economic value to the global economy, yet the build-out of essential infrastructure appears to us to be hampered by stark shortages of hardware, of sustainable energy, of training data and of talent. Innovators, including many of those in our Lazard VGB AI Infra 40 are responding with a range of solutions across the AI infrastructure stack.

4 key market trends emerged through our research and company interviews:

• Rethinking the Stack for the AI Age: The optimal architectures of hardware, software and associated tooling appear to be shifting significantly for the AI Era and technical efficiency. Architectures will likely become increasingly flexible and driven by AI use-case.
• Focus on AI Sustainability: Rapidly increasing energy requirements of AI training and inference is leading to a focus on architectural energy efficiency and increasing the need for optimized energy and AI infrastructure integration.
• Looming Data Constraints: Limited supply of high-quality language data is leading to opportunities in alternative and synthetic data sources.
• The Dawn of Autonomous AI Agents: Co-pilot agents are just the start of harnessing the power of LLMs for agents. We see multi-agent and autonomous agent systems as a possible key theme over the next 12 months.