In 2014, Australian entrepreneur Tuhin Srivastava had scored a meeting with Sarah Guo, then the youngest partner at storied VC firm Greylock. He was pitching her on a healthcare startup that used machine learning to analyze a person’s medical history. Guo was impressed — not by the idea, which was “generic,” she says, but by him and his cofounder. Five years later, he tried again, this time with something far more promising: tools that make it easier to build and run AI applications.

It was years before the stunning launch of ChatGPT mainstreamed artificial intelligence, but Guo was already confident that more businesses would soon turn to AI and need cheap and efficient ways to use it. She wrote a $1.5 million check into what became Basten, co-leading the startup’s $3 million seed round in 2019. “All we had was some idea of a company on scratch paper,” Srivastava says.

For the first four years, the company made no money. AI tools weren’t being rapidly adopted back then. The best thing to do was to wait for the market to come around. Almost overnight, it did.

Today, Baseten is valued at $5 billion, with revenue growing over 10 times in the past year. Guo invested in every round, first from Greylock and then from her own VC firm Conviction, which she launched in October 2022. Today, she says her stake is worth 10 times its initial value. “We own the most from day zero and it's clearly going to be a winner company,” says Guo, 37.

Her stakes have grown more than tenfold in other portfolio crown jewels: legal AI company Harvey, ChatGPT for doctors OpenEvidence, AI-powered customer service firm Sierra, AI coding startup Cognition and open source AI developer Mistral. Combined, these six startups alone are worth $62 billion.

Of all of Guo’s prescient bets, her most notable one is on artificial intelligence itself. She realized early that the........

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