Introduction
The rampant media hype / anti-hype around AI is almost as crazy-making as trying to comprehend NVIDIA’s market cap. But it’s best for us to leave nuances of investing in the Magnificent 7 for public market bubble experts, and to focus on the venture capital AI landscape that can be equally vexing to understand.
Please join Capria Ventures’ Managing Partner and AI expert Will Poole who will lead a lively and participative workshop discussing how private market VC investors can avoid being Late for the AI Train by finding and investing in the best companies that are AI-all-in, rapidly applying generative and agentic AI to make their businesses grow faster and more profitably.
As the leading VC investor for applied AI in the Global South, Capria has built a dedicated AI tech development team to assist founders in accelerating their AI journey using state of the art generative and agentic tools and services. In this workshop Will Poole will show you demos of innovative AI-fueled applications and discuss the fundamentals of how to look at applied AI companies from a VC investing perspective, sorting the substance from the sizzle. He will show you examples of how Capria is using AI to enhance their operations, and he will introduce an analytical framework for evaluating AI upside and risk as investors look at a dizzying stream of companies.
Note this workshop will not look at the challenges of investing in LLMs and associated infrastructure and tools companies, but we will discuss them at the high level.
One Hour Agenda
- 3 minutes – Introductions
- 10 minutes – AI in context of 50 years of tech disruptions; understanding current AI use, trends, and the generative and agentic AI stack, from silicon to services
- 10 minutes – Demos of AI solutions for investing, including agentic workflows automated by Capria for its own operations
- 10 minutes – How to speed adoption of AI in your organization: rapid experimentation and change management strategies
- 10 minutes – An investor’s framework for evaluating a startup’s AI upside and risks relative to AI, near and long term, including analysing “data moats” and detecting “thin layer innovation”
- 15 minutes – Q&A
- 10 minutes – Five AI tools you should be deploying internally now to help you better understand the current and future potential
- 10 minutes – macro trends – where the money is going, incumbent investment patterns, regional considerations
Workshop Leader: Will Poole, Managing Partner, Capria Ventures
Will Poole is a serial entrepreneur and three-decade participant in the global VC ecosystem. He and his partners added applied AI as a core element of their investing thesis about a week after OpenAI unleashed ChatGPT to the world in 2022.
He is currently the Co-Founder and Managing Partner of Capria Ventures. He has been directly investing in startups since 1997 and developed wisdom beyond his years as he navigated the downturns of 2000 and 2008. His first institutional venture fund was raised in 2012. He and his partners together manage over USD 200M in AUM in companies spanning the Global South, from São Paulo to Cairo to Bangalore to Jakarta, and soon in the GCC. Their latest fund, Capria India Fund III, launched in Q2 2025 with a target size of USD 100M. Anchor investors include Raj and Indra Nooyi (former Pepsi CEO), Bill Gates (via his family office), and Godrej Industries (a prominent Indian industrial family office).
A common reaction from investors and founders who learn of Capria’s captive AI development team accelerating their portfolio’s work is “…this is amazing — we’ve not seen any other VCs doing this anywhere.”
Will is also the co-author of a soon to be released book, Flourishing with AI, a pragmatic guide for early- to mid-career professionals and their leaders who are looking to “make AI their ally” and navigate the turbulent organizational transformation that’s spreading across the word at an increasingly dizzying pace.
In his big tech career, Will was a Corporate Vice President at Microsoft, leading several business lines, including the $13 billion Windows desktop business, representing ⅔ of the company profits at the time. After that role, he led the company’s efforts to tailor products to the needs of mass-market customers in emerging markets.
Will’s career started by founding two startups at the dawn of the PC era, growing a USD 200M business line in the early days at Sun Microsystems, and pioneering e-commerce at eShop, which he co-founded in 1991 and was acquired by Microsoft in 1996.
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