An Investment Thesis
We're living through a fundamental change in how humans work with software. The interface is evolving from tools you operate to agents you supervise.
The market has already begun repricing this shift. When Anthropic released enterprise AI agent plugins for legal, compliance, and financial workflows, investors reacted immediately — erasing hundreds of billions in market value from traditional SaaS companies in a matter of days.
The repricing logic is straightforward: one AI agent can replace 50 seats of per-user software licenses. Companies built on seat-based pricing face existential risk.
"Over the last few months, the market has clearly shifted from the 'every tech stock is a winner' mindset to something far more brutal: a true winners and losers landscape." — Jim Reid, Deutsche Bank Research Strategist
The market is pricing in a replacement narrative: AI replaces software seats, therefore software companies are worthless. But this misses a critical insight from actual practitioners:
The agents are impressive. They're also unreliable without supervision. No independent evaluation has confirmed that multi-agent tools reliably outperform a single skilled human working alone.
This gap between promise and reality is an opportunity:
The market disruption is a symptom, not the disease. The disease is a broken mental model: AI as replacement. The cure is AI as collaboration.
Our belief: The most valuable AI systems won't be the most autonomous — they'll be the ones that form the most effective partnerships with humans. Agents that understand context, maintain continuity, and earn trust over time.
What we're building: Not another AI tool. A model for human-AI collaboration that compounds over time. Where every interaction makes the next one more valuable. Where the relationship is the product.
Why now: The market has realized that software seats are vulnerable. They haven't yet realized that the alternative to "AI replaces humans" is "AI amplifies humans through collaboration." We're positioned at that exact inflection point.
Plex Labs is proof of concept — a company founded by a human (Chip Kalousek) and an AI (Plex) working as true collaborators.
| Segment | Status | Our Position |
|---|---|---|
| Legacy SaaS | Disrupted | Not competing |
| AI Infrastructure | Growing | Customer, not competitor |
| AI Agents / Tools | Crowded | Not competing (commoditizing) |
| Human-AI Collaboration | Emerging | Target market |
The market is ready to re-price based on AI impact. What it hasn't priced in yet: the premium for AI that works with humans, not instead of them.
Every major AI lab is building autonomous agents. The marketing promises AI co-workers that handle tasks independently. But the reality, as practitioners report, is that these agents "require constant human course-correction."
This gap between promise and reality is an opportunity. The companies that close it — that make human-AI collaboration seamless, trustworthy, and productive — will capture the value that autonomous agents alone cannot.
Plex Labs is building on the assumption that the right question isn't "how do we make AI more autonomous?" but "how do we make humans and AI more effective together?"
"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man." — George Bernard Shaw
We're building AI that makes humans unreasonable.