Insight Partners’ Devin Parekh on why the firm is diversifying while everyone else bets the farm on OpenAI and Anthropic

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Devin Parekh has co-run the heavyweight investment firm Insight Partners for 26 years. Unlike many VCs who are loud on X and seem to live on podcasts, Parekh and Insight Partners tend to lay low.

In this sit-down with TechCrunch at its StrictlyVC event on Thursday night in New York, Parekh was refreshingly candid about some of the firm’s wins (it has led and co-led numerous rounds in Databricks, for example, and owns stakes in OpenAI and Anthropic); the deals it hasn’t won, including buzzy AI legal-tech company Legora; conflicts of interest in venture investing; and why Insight has stuck to a diversified strategy even as VCs have piled into the frontier AI labs.

There’s a researcher who’s become the big story of the week — do you think that concerns about AI risk amount to hysteria, or do you have real concerns?

Sure, there’s a risk some non-state actor gets access to an open-source model and creates a biological weapon. But there’s an even higher probability we get a massive decrease in the time it takes to develop new drugs and cure diseases. I’ll take that bet.

I’m on the board of NYU Langone — what AI is already doing with patient data is amazing. We can look at 50 million patient records and tell someone walking in for something unrelated that they have a 25% chance of a heart attack. Net-net, I think this is highly positive.

There are risks, sure, just like there are risks with next-generation drone warfare. Every generation has new risks, and somehow, over time, the world still raises living standards. We’re going to need AI to scale healthcare — the population is aging and there aren’t enough medical professionals to go around.

Insight has $90 billion in assets under management but seems comparatively quiet compared to firms of similar size. Is that purposeful?

Every venture capitalist thinks they’re an expert on everything now — epidemiology during COVID, geopolitics during the Iran war. I’m not sure we’re all experts on everything. Our attitude has been: Let the portfolio do the talking. We’re investing in founders and companies. We have to communicate enough that people know who we are, but our performance should speak for itself — and that’s driven by the portfolio, not by us being loud.

You do early-stage, growth, buyouts, and presumably secondaries. What’s the split?

It’s temporal, not fixed — we invest globally, so there’s no set geographic or strategy allocation. Look at our last seven funds and you’d see different percentages of early-stage, growth, and buyout in each. Buyouts aren’t great right now — rates are high, debt markets aren’t receptive to software, exit multiples have come down. We haven’t done a major buyout since 2024.

On the venture side, valuations are rising at a pace we saw before, in 2021 — and that didn’t end well. Normally, a follow-on round means more data, so you pay a higher price for lower risk. Right now, rounds move so fast there’s almost no incremental data, so you’re paying more without reducing risk. The logical response is to go earlier.