Welcome to the era of productizing and professionalizing gen AI

Betaworks' latest Camp class is all about the maturation of a category that has already been transformative in its infancy and adolescence

We are, of course, deeply enmeshed in the age of AI startup enthusiasm, so it’s no surprise that it’s become a focus of investment firms and startup studios around the world. New York’s Betaworks, however, has better claim than most to being a trendsetter rather than a consensus-follower when it comes to providing a solid foundation upon which world-changing startups are built.

Betaworks partner Jordan Crook is a close personal friend and former colleague, but I was professionally interested in the new AI Camp program that she’s now accepting applications for, in advance of a February 2025 start date. This newest cohort of the program focuses on the “app layer,” which Crook says the firm arrived at as a natural evolution of having focused on more foundational layers of the AI tech stack leading up to now.

We got into more detail about why Betaworks thinks now is the right time to focus on the application layer with AI technology, but first some table setting around the Betaworks camp program and the firm itself.

“One of the ways that we invest is with a regular kind of pre-seed seed check, but the other way that we invest is through our Camp program,” Crook explained to me. “And Camp is a kind of evolution of our hacker-in-residence program from when we were a studio.”

Betaworks got started in 2008, hot on the heels of the financial crisis. The model was a throwback to one that was popular in the tail end of the 1990s, spinning up new products in-house by putting hackers on payroll and then investing into spin-out companies off the balance sheet. Early Betaworks companies that resulted from this approach included Giphy, Dots, Chartbeat and Bitly, to name just a few.

“When we launched our first fund in 2016, we realized that we could replicate that, and bring some of the best parts of the studio over into the fund,” Crook said. “That’s when we introduced a program called Camp.”

Camp isn’t quite an accelerator in the traditional sense, nor is it an incubator, but it’s a program that can definitely help kickstart a venture in its earliest days. Betaworks typically accepts between 8 to 12 companies in any given cohort of Camp, and if you're accepted, you automatically get an investment of up to $500,000.

Accepted companies spend 13 weeks with the Betaworks team, working onsite at their airy offices in New York’s meatpacking district, learning from the team, getting help with the fundamentals – and also getting more targeted help aimed at their specific needs as founders, relative to their particular businesses.

Unlike other accelerators, Crook says, Camp focuses on going above and beyond what she called the ‘table stakes’ of building a venture-backed business. The program and Betaworks team will of course help participants with basics like setting up their cap table, refining their pitch deck, making introductions to other investors and much more, but the actual curriculum of the program is designed to go above and beyond those fundamentals.

“We set up a curriculum that focuses on two things: One is really tight feedback loops between you and your customer so that you understand how to iterate and that you're running objective, data-verified experiments with the work that you're doing,” she explained.

“And two, on the highly specific theme of the Camp and the emergent technology itself that has allowed us to stand up a particular instance of Camp and invest in a batch of companies around this kind of core tech.”

While a lot of accelerators and incubators focus on building a repeatable playbook with a lot of common core sets of fundamentals that carry over from cohort to cohort, Betaworks goes out of their way to make most of it custom-fit for each incoming class, Crook said. That translates to only around 10% of the content, including things like a session on the best habits for an early stage founder to form led by firm founder John Borthwick, or a storytelling session led by Crook, being repeated Camp-to-Camp. The rest is “completely built from the ground up based on the composition of the cohort,” she said.

As for the focus of this specific iteration of Camp, it evolved naturally over the past few years as a result of the major shifts that have occurred in tech, and Crook explained that it’s also building on the foundation set out by past cohorts and programs.

“In 2022, we did a camp called ThinkCamp: it was really meant to be around tools for productivity,” she said. “And GPT 3, I believe, or maybe 2.5 – it was very early on in the GPT and diffusion model evolution – that came out right at the beginning of Camp, so a lot of the companies immediately started playing with this technology.”

While it hadn’t started out with this intent, that class of Camp became focused on cognitive tooling for LLMs and diffusion models, and effectively building ways to engage in thought partnership with these models. That led to a more intentional focus on “copilots for anything,” and a cohort about augmentative AI, then one looking at AI agents specifically, pushing the bar further in step with the technology developing greater capability and greater reliability.

For the AI Camp: Agents program in particular, and the ‘Native Apps’ one that immediately preceded the current Application Layer camp for which Betaworks is now accepting applications, Crook said that the approach was about investing in many of the core components that would make mature, useful applications that could be deployed, at scale, in B2B SaaS settings possible.

“We said, what if we took the human out of the loop entirely? Is AI capable of doing the last mile, actually taking autonomous action, evaluating its work, using chain of thought reasoning, planning, et cetera?”

“Before we ever launched camp, we said, we don't think the success rates at the application layer for this are going to be very high,” Crook added. “So let's invest in a lot of infrastructure that allows agentic tech to get higher success rates. And so that's what we did, and that kind of pushed us to native apps camp, which was our camp at the end of this year. Because we believe that the ecosystem had evolved enough.”

Crook said that in that camp, they saw a lot of startups applying that were building at the application layer in a way that didn’t quite fit the ‘native’ UX thesis narrowly, but that were addressing the needs of much more mature large-scale business customers in novel ways. This was also a gap she said they identified in many of the approaches taking by the large model companies and hyperscalers, who were “struggling to productize their models for the application layer.”

“We think there are both vertical industries that still have been basically untouched by high utility SaaS, and also horizontal opportunities around prosumer, ‘future of work’ applications,” she said. “There's SaaS for everything, but is it getting the job done? Is the NPS score high? Probably not, because there are industries where they're just too niche and fragmented to really serve properly with a rigid, old-school software tool.”

The goal with this Camp is to angle it more B2B than Betaworks has done previously, with an eye towards identifying apps that “solve actual problems” for users. Because while we all acknowledge that AI has been massively impressive to date in terms of what it can do, Crook points out that in the moment, when you try to use it to address a very specific and urgent need, it “doesn’t usually help.”

“And so we’re trying to invest in the stuff that is going to come to mind when you’re in a pickle and you say, ‘Wow, that just saved the day,’” she said.

AI Camp: App Layer will run from late-February through May of next year, and is an in-residence program on site at Betaworks’ office in NYC’s Meatpacking district. You can find out more about the program and the application here, and applications are due by the end of this week for consideration.