Beyond the Keynotes: The Real Conversations at the Event

The panel that deserves more attention right now is not the one with the biggest stage. It is the one asking the hardest questions.

Mina Mutafchieva, Partner at HV Capital, is the name you should be searching after this. A venture investor who has watched the AI wave reshape portfolio construction in real time, Mutafchieva brings the kind of ground-level clarity that cuts through the noise. While the broader market debates AI hype cycles, she is in the room doing the actual work of deciding which companies survive the new valuation reality and which ones do not.

The panel, titled "The New Reality of Startup Value in the AI Era," brought together five voices who rarely share a stage. That combination alone makes it worth unpacking.

Carrie Babcock from the British Business Bank sits on the public finance side of the table. Her lens is not pure market dynamics. It is about where institutional capital meets early-stage risk, and how government-backed investment frameworks are being forced to evolve as AI compresses traditional growth timelines. The question of what a startup is actually worth when AI can 10x its output with half the headcount is not abstract for her. It is a live policy and deployment challenge.

Laura Modiano carries the OpenAI perspective. As Head of Founder Experience, Global, she works at the intersection of the world's most talked-about AI company and the startup ecosystem it is actively reshaping. Founders building on top of foundation models operate in a different commercial reality than founders five years ago. Modiano knows that reality from the inside.

Valerie Delva, Vice President of AI at AVEVA, brings industrial software into the conversation. AVEVA operates in sectors where AI adoption is slower, higher-stakes, and more scrutinized. Her presence on this panel signals something important: the valuation conversation is not only about SaaS multiples and consumer apps. It is about what happens when AI enters infrastructure, energy, and engineering.

Alex Schmitt from Lightspeed rounds out the investor side. Lightspeed has backed companies across cycles and geographies. Schmitt's perspective adds the pure venture calculus to a panel that otherwise skews toward institutional and operational angles.

What this group is collectively wrestling with is a fundamental question. If AI reduces the cost and time required to build, does that compress valuations or expand them? Does a smaller, AI-native team deserve a higher multiple or a discount? There are no clean answers yet. But the fact that a public finance institution, a top-tier VC, an industrial software executive, and the team inside OpenAI are sitting together to figure it out tells you exactly where the industry's attention needs to go.

This is the conversation that shapes where capital flows next.

LinkedIn tags: @MinaMutafchieva @CarrieBabcock @LauraModiano @ValerieDelva @AlexSchmitt