Deven Parekh, a managing director at Insight Partners, told TechCrunch the $90 billion firm deliberately avoids concentrating capital in OpenAI and Anthropic the way many competitors have. "This business has always rewarded diversification over a long horizon," he said.
Insight has returned more than $20 billion to its limited partners over the past two years through sales and IPOs, with a few billion more coming, Parekh said. He said the firm typically writes checks of $20 million to $25 million so it can add to winning positions later, pointing to cybersecurity company Wiz as an example where successive rounds outperformed a single large commitment.
Parekh acknowledged Insight lost legal-tech startup Legora to General Catalyst. "I think they sold their value proposition better than we sold ours that time," he said, adding, "It's a big world; we don't need to win every deal."
He defended holding stakes in competing AI labs by noting that at later investment stages, a firm like Insight acts as a passive shareholder without governance influence over strategy, so the conflict is more theoretical than operational, he said.
The comments map out how one of the largest generalist growth funds thinks about conviction at this stage of the AI boom: smaller checks with room to double down beat one large bet, and holding positions in competing labs is treated as a feature, not a conflict. Founders raising later-stage rounds should read that as a signal of what this class of investor is actually optimizing for.