From Hype to Impact: How WestCap Companies Are Delivering on AI

When people ask me about myself, I say I’m a lifelong learner. I often joke that I’ve spent way too many years in school: I have two Master's degrees, a teaching license, and a PhD in physics. After I ran out of degrees, I completed an AI fellowship at Insight Data Science, a pipeline for placing science PhDs into some of the world’s best tech companies.

When I was at Insight, I quickly learned the power and potential of using AI to solve real problems. Natural Language Processing quickly became my specialty, but I've been fortunate to lead initiatives across a broad spectrum of AI, from large language models to computer vision and advanced anomaly detection. I earned my stripes working in innovation-focused teams at companies like TD Ameritrade and FICO. Now, at WestCap, my role is using those years of experience to support our portfolio companies in scaling everything AI and engineering.

It’s an amazing time to be a lifelong learner; the pace of innovation in AI is like nothing we have seen before. As I look across our portfolio, I’m proud to say that our businesses are well ahead of the curve in AI adoption when compared to technology businesses globally. Really, that’s not a surprise since many WestCap operators (and portfolio companies!) have been leveraging similar tools for over a decade.

AI capabilities are changing incredibly quickly, there is a lot of noise, and the dust has yet to settle. In this ever-changing landscape our mission remains the same: to have an outsized impact on our portfolio companies in a way that no one else can. As operators, this isn’t the first time we’ve seen disruptive technology. We can apply that experience to help portfolio companies cut through the noise and keep their sights focused on real value creation.

How we got here

The term artificial intelligence represents a broad class of technology, from the tried-and-true statistical approaches of the 1960s, through multiple generations of machine learning, and finally arriving at the Generative AI capabilities you know today. Generative AI technology has been evolving at an unprecedented pace. We are witnessing a dramatic race to the bottom; an illustrative example is that in the span of 15 months (April 2023 to July 2024), the cost of GPT4-level intelligence dropped 375 fold. These models are not only cheaper, but they are also getting smaller and more efficient. To put this into perspective, in early 2023, you would have paid $34,000 in datacenter grade hardware for a level intelligence that just a year later costs a mere $400 in consumer grade hardware.

In January, DeepSeek rocked the world by releasing the first open reasoning model with state of the art performance. This level of performance used to be siloed away in subscriptions to closed-models from providers such as OpenAI and Anthropic. You cannot customize or finetune closed-models, but with the introduction of these open models you can now modify and run them on your own hardware. Having access to open, advanced models is an incredible unlock for our portfolio. They are now empowered to build on top of and customize models for specific use cases, in other words innovation is back on the menu.

At WestCap, we are builders; we pride ourselves on going deeper than just an academic understanding of these trends in AI. With DeepSeek, we knew the best way to understand it was to build with it ourselves. We deployed the open model into an isolated cloud environment and built a Slackbot in Python. Then we put the model through its paces, using it to troubleshoot real world challenges, such as converting legacy bank file formats into more modern representations.

AI in action

Our aim is to keep our AI skills sharp so that we can inspire our portfolio companies by demonstrating the art of the possible. Let’s look at how AI is being put to work across the portfolio. For example, it has transformed how our companies think about sales onboarding. Normally, it takes a year or more for a new sales hire to become fully versed in a new market and set of products. With AI avatars mimicking customer behaviors, it is allowing a new crop of sales professionals to interact, roleplay, and in some cases cut that onboarding time in half.

At Blueground, a leading proptech business offering furnished apartments for long-term stays, AI has transformed operations. AI assistants are helping unlock access to internal knowledge across the business while AI agents are saving on-call developers up to 15 minutes per alert by providing context and root cause analysis for swift resolution.

Zupee is leveraging AI to power a rapid, high-quality app release engine that integrates AI-driven automation across testing, visual validation, and performance monitoring—enabling faster feature rollouts without sacrificing reliability. They most recently rolled out an all-in-one internal management tool to plan, run, and track over 5,600 automated user tests for their app releases.

Hopper, a data-driven travel app, is using generative AI voice assistants to drive speed and efficiency in customer support. AI voice agents are working 24/7 to handle 15% of their call volume autonomously, freeing up human agents to tackle more complex issues.

Generative AI is the most disruptive technology of our generation. So, we’re doing what we always do at WestCap: sharing best in class strategies and technologies, running peer groups, and offering hands-on assistance. When portfolio companies look to accelerate their growth and keep costs under control, we bring on world-class vendors with preferred pricing to autonomously optimize cloud spend. When one of our portfolio companies in the real estate sector built agents to autonomously handle inbounds, they presented it in our CTO Summit as part of an AI showcase. When another portfolio company in the fintech space kicked off an organization-wide transformational AI journey, we were there—ready to help them with education and hands-on training.

The key to our success is simple: WestCap’s world-class operators partnering with cutting-edge teams across the portfolio leads to real operating leverage. Now, let’s build.