AI, Capital & the US-Australia Corridor: Reflections from NY Tech Week

By Anthony Bekker, Chris Spillman and Li Reilly, Biztech Lawyers, New York

If one word was humming through New York last week, it was AI. The second was capital. We spent New York Tech Week in rooms full of founders, investors and operators, and the through-line was unmistakable: an almost electric optimism about what artificial intelligence is doing to every sector, and a fast-evolving conversation about who is going to fund it.

For the uninitiated, New York Tech Week is unlike a traditional conference. Presented by a16z, it has no main stage and no central hall; it is a deliberately distributed affair: a sprawling collection of more than a thousand independently hosted events spread across the city, run by VCs, startups, corporates and community organizers. The breadth is hard to overstate: panels, demos, hackathons, founder dinners, pitch nights and happy hours from morning to midnight, all week. The core of it, this year, was well and truly AI.

Here is what stayed with us.

How fast can we build? This year's core focus

The energy in New York is the kind founders dream about. Across panel after panel, the tone was confident, forward-leaning and impatient; far more "how fast can we build" than "what could go wrong". AI was not treated as one vertical among many; it was treated as the substrate everything else now runs on.

That set the backdrop for the first event of our week: the Accelerate AI Summit, hosted by the American Australian Association together with Austrade and the Tech Council of Australia, bringing American and Australian AI companies into the same room. The atmosphere was genuinely charged. Across five themed sessions, from breaking into enterprise sales and building strategic partnerships to AI infrastructure at scale and accessing capital, speakers were strikingly bullish on the level of investment flowing into the sector, and on the appetite to back ambitious companies moving across the US-Australia corridor. A VC reverse-pitch, where investors sold themselves to founders rather than the other way around, captured the mood neatly: in this market, good companies have options.

The "SaaS apocalypse" looks like a blip

For all the talk that AI would hollow out software-as-a-service, the public markets are telling a different story. The much-feared "SaaS apocalypse" is looking more like a blip than a collapse; speakers repeatedly pointed to the recovery in SaaS valuations since January. The reason we kept hearing was the enduring value of the system of record. The companies that own the authoritative data layer, the place a business actually runs from, are proving far harder to displace than the doom narrative assumed. AI is reshaping how that software gets built and used; on this evidence, it is not erasing the value of owning the record.

Capital is diversifying — fast

The most thought-provoking session of the week was a candid conversation on raising capital convened by advisory firm RSM, featuring Michael Loeb, founder and CEO of Loeb.nyc. Loeb made a striking case: the family-office market, as a source of deployable capital, has come to eclipse venture capital and private equity combined, and the opportunities that opens up for founders are substantial.

That theme rhymed with one of the clearest signals from the AAA summit: the sheer diversity of capital sources now active in the US market. We heard repeatedly about ultra-specialized funding pools: vehicles built to back very specific niches within the broader ecosystem, each with its own thesis, tempo and risk appetite. This is a structurally different market from the one Australian and UK founders are used to, where capital is more concentrated and the menu of credible funding routes is shorter. In New York, the question is less "can we raise?" and more "which kind of capital fits this company, at this stage, for this ambition?"

David Malloy of Tech Square Ventures put the domicile question bluntly: move your corporate headquarters to the United States sooner rather than later, or be realistic and aim your raise at international VCs. Many US funds are tightly constrained by their mandates when it comes to backing companies domiciled outside the US, and a good number simply cannot invest in a foreign-domiciled asset at all. For Australian and UK founders, that turns "where are we incorporated?" from a housekeeping detail into a fundraising strategy.

Building for the US: talent, AI and reinvention

Beyond capital, three operating observations from the summit floor stuck with us: the kind of hard-won advice worth more than any panel slide.

Your first US hire is often a salesperson. The instinct for Australian and UK companies landing in the States is to add more product or engineering. The repeated counsel was the opposite: the first feet on the ground should usually be in sales. Distribution, not more build, is what cracks the US market.

AI-native talent pays for itself. Organizations (and individuals) who can genuinely use AI to 10x their output earn their premium many times over. The more expensive AI-native hire is, in practice, the cheaper one. Building an AI-native team has stopped being an experiment and become a cost-of-doing-business advantage.

The most valuable asset may already be in the building. For companies looking to reinvent themselves, the richest untapped value is frequently internal: a deep well of IP, data and institutional knowledge that has never been pulled together. Bring those assets into a single orchestration layer that drives better decision-making end to end, and you create something competitors cannot easily copy: a source of sustained competitive differentiation rather than a one-off feature.

What it means for founders

More routes to capital is unambiguously good news, but it raises the bar on getting the structure right.

• Match the capital to the company. A family office, a sector-specialist fund and a traditional VC will each want different things on governance, on diligence, on timelines and on terms. The structuring and the paperwork should reflect the investor you are actually courting, not a generic template.
• Be diligence-ready before you need to be. US investors move quickly when conviction lands, and they screen hard early. Clean cap tables, tidy IP assignment and defensible contracts are the difference between a follow-up meeting and a polite pass.
• Plan the corridor deliberately. For Australian and UK companies, accessing this capital often means a US presence, and sometimes a flip-up of the holding company. We spent time last week with founders weighing exactly that move. Done well, it opens up the funding base; done reactively, it creates tax, governance and IP headaches that are expensive to unwind.

These are the moments where having counsel that can sign off across Australia, the UK and the US simultaneously, around the clock and around the world, turns a multi-jurisdiction scramble into a single, coordinated decision.

The takeaway

New York's message to ambitious companies is that capital is more abundant, more specialized and more global than it has ever been — and the founders who win will be the ones who can see the whole field and move first. That is the vantage point we try to give our clients: rise above the friction, see around corners, and keep moving ahead of market speed.

We came home energized. The corridor between Australia, the UK and the US has rarely looked more open — and for venturous companies with the imagination to use it, the opportunity is real.

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