M12, Microsoft's Venture Fund’s Post

Cracking the Enterprise Code in AI Selling into the enterprise—beyond pilot engagements—is still the gold standard for AI startups. At M12, Microsoft's Venture Fund, we regularly calibrate what “go-to-market maturity” really looks like by listening to enterprise customers who are actively testing AI solutions across internal and external applications. We brought together leaders from Barclays and six of our portfolio companies pushing the boundaries of AI data and infrastructure: 🔹 Arcee AI Lucas Atkins 🔹 Arize AI Jason Lopatecki 🔹 HiddenLayer – Malcolm Harkins 🔹 Fastino – George Hurn-Maloney 🔹 SynthLabs – Nathan Lile 🔹 DatologyAI – Ari Morcos What we learned: ✅ The bar is high for new SaaS vendors selling into financial and regulated industries. ✅ Marketplaces like Azure can streamline procurement and onboarding. ✅ Security must be embedded at every data touchpoint. ✅Transparent model overhead—context length, GPU-free compatibility, observability, and task-specific performance—matters more than ever. Huge thanks to Torstein Berteig, Yusuf Kazi, and Dimitrios Emmanoulopoulos from Barclays for their invaluable insights—and to Michael Stewart and James Wu for leading this M12 founder session. We’re proud to help catalyze this ecosystem and support the next generation of enterprise-ready AI.