Chasing AI Relevance While Demanding Profitability: Experts Share Their Thoughts on AI-First Strategy This panel session at Singapore FinTech Festival 2025 validates the deepest anxieties of founders caught between VC demands for AI and the market's unyielding push for near-term profit.

When it comes to deploying AI automation, Prajit Nanu, Founder & Chief Executive Officer of Nium has already created an AI agent that consolidates invoices from users' various apps and delivers them directly to their email inbox. As a welcomed decision, it's not a myth that such AI automations are transforming time-consuming manual processes into efficient, automated workflows across various industries, delivering significant cost savings and boosting productivity.

Prajit shared these thoughts alongside a distinguished panel of leaders, including Andrea Baronchelli (Co-founder & CEO, Aspire), Bill Deng (Founder & CEO, XTransfer), Visa Kannan (Managing Partner, Saison Capital) and Nobutake Suzuki (President & CEO, MUFG Innovation Partners) during the panel session titled "VCs & Founders Panel: AI-first or Profitability-first - Can Founders Really Chase Two Rabbits?" at the Singapore FinTech Festival on Thursday (13 November).

Moderated by Murakami Rei, Founding Partner of Kadan Capital, this panel session addressed the significant strategic dilemma faced by founders: the pressure to adopt an AI-first strategy to satisfy VCs and clients, which often conflicts with the immediate market demand for profitability.

As someone who's always looking ahead, Bill, who founded XTransfer in 2017 in Shanghai with the goal of providing smaller businesses with access to the same banking services available to larger corporations, has already begun pioneering investments in large language model tools. "The machine will be able to use structured data to make decisions. We have been investing so much of these resources (in the company) this year," Bill added.

Before joining MUFG Innovation Partners, Nobutake started his career as a venture capitalist in 2002 and he foresaw the potential of AI as the new engine for growth and modernisation. He added that the market often concentrates on the superficial layers of AI, but its real power is realised when it acts as an agent of deep industrial transformation—especially in crucial sectors like energy and finance. His approach is therefore strategic: integrating AI directly into the institutional fabric that connects financial entities and corporate clients.

On the question whether founders can achieve profitability and expand on AI, Prajit said: "I think if your company isn't focused on AI, then it won't exist. I believe it's fundamentally changing the way we do things. Financial services have gone through a massive transformation in the last 20 years, but I think the amount of automation that's going to come into financial services in the next five years will be much greater, because the impact is massive, right?"

Separately, it's also a great time for startup AI applications, even though the initial cost is a considerable amount of money, a statement chimed by Nobutake. But he believes that eventually, it will yield enough return. "The ROI (Return on Investment) for AI investment, I think, is far, far higher than others. For example, our developers are the most expensive resource in our company. But now, developers are using tools like Cursor for development on the backend. Using this AI is really helping the company reduce costs." He also revealed his own large language model he called, 'Trade Pilot.' which is specifically trained to deal with documents related to trade payments.

"We invested heavily in infrastructure but it turned out to be a very big investment for us. Crucially, it handles tasks that general large language models cannot. It has been very, very helpful, particularly in our customer service. Sometimes the benefits cannot be measured in instant money, but in the long term, AI really does something human beings cannot. So, we don't think this is a tough question for us," Nobutake shared.

Andrea, who co-founded Aspire, an all-in-one finance platform for businesses that has secured nearly US$300 million in funding, added that the more companies apply AI in their day-to-day operation, the more profitable they will be. While the costs are significant, it's still less than what they will have to pay to run certain processes the old way.

"From a perspective of value creation for clients, things are highly more complicated. It's true that you need to put a couple of small teams together to build something truly valuable. These are things that we run as a big bet; we don't know what's going to come out. It's very hard to quantify the value creation that you need to explore. But again, it's not really a choice. What can you do? You need to allocate some people to innovate, or you won't be able to differentiate yourself with features. For us, it's a lot about workflow management. Financial services are a classic case of complex workflows and connecting the dots to create value for the end users—for example, the finance teams. So, we continue to invest there," he shared.

Visa, who comes with an extensive experience of scaling companies, doesn't think that a billion-dollar revenue company that only does AI in Financial Services (FS) would emerge as a winner in the long-run: "I don't have the answer to that, but I don't think so. So, maybe it's about correctly valuing it and understanding how the revenues will grow. Is it a service company, even with human needs involved?"

"This goes back to what Andrea said: "You could be a collections tech company that effectively had negative margins, meaning they were paying more in tokens than they were getting from their customers, because customers are only going to pay for successful calls, but the company had to pay for all calls. So, you have to kind of understand some of these dynamics in emerging markets: Who's paying for what? How much will they pay? What is the market? Eventually, maybe the market will improve, but I think the definition of what a winner is is important there. If you define that correctly, I think there can be multiple winners," she continued.