Equity What startups are building next, according to OpenAI’s Head of Startups
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Nov 12, 2025 Marc Manara, Head of Startups at OpenAI, shares insights from the AI startup landscape. He discusses the rapid shift from traditional development cycles to one-day sprints, reshaping engineering team structures. Manara highlights how some startups are customizing models for specific industries like healthcare and finance. He also points out areas where AI integration is still lacking, particularly in longer-horizon tasks, which remain a significant frontier for innovation.
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OpenAI Is Focused On Startups And B2B
- OpenAI invests heavily in startups and B2B, not just consumer chat products.
- Marc Manara says the company built global teams to support startups with product, research, and sales.
Tool Calling Drives Agent Performance
- Startups ask for steerability, lower cost, and lower latency from future models.
- Marc Manara highlights tool-calling reliability as crucial for agent performance.
Route Tasks To Right-Sized Models
- Use multiple model sizes and orchestration to route the right model to each subtask.
- Combine small fast models for classification with larger models for context-heavy reasoning to save cost and latency.