The FDE Bubble: Silicon Valley's Most Expensive Game Of Pretend
Enterprise AI companies relying on armies of forward deployed engineers are disguising labor-intensive services as scalable software, inflating recurring revenue and valuations while falling short of autonomy claims, argues Anurag Gurtu, co-founder and CEO of Airrived. In this guest commentary he urges buyers and investors to examine deployment costs and gross margins to distinguish sustainable software businesses from expensive staffing operations.
Via Crunchbase News
By Anurag Gurtu
Congratulations to the enterprise AI company that just raised another nine-figure round to solve a problem software is supposed to solve by itself: getting humans to use the product.
You know the one. Won’t name it. Don’t have to. You’ve read the press release — “autonomous,” “agentic,” “category-defining” in paragraph one, and then, a few paragraphs down, where the money is actually going: hiring an army of engineers to sit inside customer offices and manually make the…
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