Published on February 10, 2026
Watch the video of this panel on Gamma Prime’s YouTube channel:
Panel talk with Michael Terpin (Founder and CEO at Transform Group), Christian Sauer (CEO at Soonami), Catrina Wang (GP at Portal Ventures), Amit Mehra (Partner at Borderless Capital) and Anna Shakola (Head of Business Development at Cointelegraph Accelerator)
Anna Shakola (Head of Business Development at Cointelegraph Accelerator):
That’s a topic for another big conference. We as a media, we question ourselves how to improve ourselves with AI, but how to stay authentic and unique still.
Michael Terpin (Founder and CEO at Transform Group):
So I just wanted to defend AIogenic training. First of all, the amount of wallets has increased from 70 million last year to 200 million DEX wallets. And I would agree, you don’t want to have a lot of agents out there just, you know, kind of learning on their own, fighting against each other. With AI Quant, you program it. It’s your responsibility. The top of our leaderboard made 660% profit last month. The bottom one lost money. So you go in, and if you’re losing money, you keep on, you know, sliding your different 30 parameters that you have. Are you looking at tokens from 50,000 to 10 million? Are you looking at tokens from 10 million to a billion? And you just keep on playing with us until you get a formula that works for you. And the ones at the top of the leaderboard, their strategies are hidden, so you can buy their strategies and copy trade for an extra fee that we split with the creator of the strategy. And so that one, I think, is a winning model. And, you know, I’m very bullish on that one. And then I think, sort of lost it, but it was another thing that was sort of, you know, kind of over-hyped and undervalued. Oh, I remember now. I agree with you on not using VC money to go and buy chips. Chamath Palihapitiya on the All In podcast last year said any VC — and this is talking about centralized, I think it’s less so probably decentralized AI — but he said any VC who greenlights a check of like 50 million dollars to buy chips at like a billion-dollar valuation should be fired. He’s like, these chips will be at like 90% off in a year, and yet you’ve already, you know, put this money into hardware. You should go and put the money into the software engineers, and then basically use your valuation to take out debt to go and buy the chips, and that, you know, Diddy is happy to give you payment terms.
Anna Shakola:
We are wrapping up the panel, so I want to finish with a funny, down-to-earth, simple question. I just arrived from San Francisco. I visited all demo days like a16z, Y Combinator, HF0, and funnily enough, the new trend is that each company has to pass an AI test. What it means is that all those accelerators and VCs are taking all internal startup routines in terms of optimization with AI. So I want to highlight just two AI tools that are must-haves from Silicon Valley. One is SuperHuman. A lot of sales teams are forced to use SuperHuman on a daily basis. Not for the C-levels, obviously, because we need to keep this authentic tone of voice. And another one is UpGrade, a recent alumni of the HF0 accelerator. So they are trying to answer the question: what marketing activity brought actual users, payments, yada, yada, yada. So very down-to-earth — one or two AI applications that must be used for any successful startups.
Catrina Wang (GP at Portal Ventures):
SuperHuman is awesome. Granola is great for note-taking, AI note-taking. Vimco is great for calendar review. It’s like a better version of Calendly. If you don’t want to use Calendly — Calendly is also awesome — but that’s not exactly AI. Notion actually has a great copilot, in a way, to help you edit. And since then, we have, you know, everyone doing the same thing. But you do have a first mover there. Yeah, there should be plenty. Thank you.
Michael Terpin:
I’m just looking for things that are not, you know, ultimately going to be sold to Google and Microsoft, where they own all my data and learn on all my data. I want to have things that I control, and that’s the promise of decentralization in DeFi, and now the promise of decentralization and decentralized AI. And so, you know, the broad range of applications I mentioned — sales agents, sales trading. I guess the last portfolio company I’ll mention is Alpha AI, which is, you know, the founder there is the former head of strategy for NASDAQ, and he’s building an agentic Bloomberg terminal, both physical and on-chain, that basically lets you go in and plug in a whole bunch of decentralized modules for your research and trading.
Anna Shakola:
Thank you, Michael.
Christian Sauer (CEO at Soonami):
We have a couple of nice AIs in our portfolio. One is called Minekeeper that allows you — if there’s a transition from one employee to another — it allows the new employee to ask the AI what the other person actually did. I think that’s a pretty interesting use case. And we have Andrual, or Dearflow, that does automated email inbox support for you. So there are a couple of good ones.
Amit Mehra (Partner at Borderless Capital):
I think a lot of people — maybe other than that — use Cursor, like a lot of… Which one?
Anna Shakola:
Cursor.
Amit Mehra:
Cursor?
Anna Shakola:
Yeah.
Amit Mehra:
And the other one?
Anna Shakola:
Yeah, yeah. Cursor.
Amit Mehra:
And then, I think eventually what would be very useful is benchmarking these various tools — which performed well. So we have a Portco, but others like Layer Lens are one of our Portcos. But how do you benchmark which model actually does well?
