Crunchbase News: The AI Value Chain Has Shifted. Here’s How Founders Can Still Build A Sustainable Business

In this article, we discuss how the rapid rise of AI has fundamentally shifted the technology value chain and changed how startups must think about growth and profitability. The traditional SaaS model — build a great app, charge a flat monthly fee, and let infrastructure costs fade into the background — no longer works when compute and inference expenses scale with usage. Founders now face a landscape where margins are captured deeper in the stack by infrastructure, hardware, and model providers. To stay competitive and build a sustainable business, we outline three critical moves: own proprietary data to create a defensible moat, price based on usage so revenue scales with cost, and avoid model lock-in by designing flexible architectures and maintaining leverage with providers.

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