Don’t be fooled by the prolonged crypto bear market, the industry remains a sound investment and is less prone to replacement by AI than traditional software as a service (SaaS) operations, according to Ravi Tanuku, CEO of KRAKacquisition Corp.
The company, a Nasdaq-listed special purpose acquisition company (SPAC), sponsored by Kraken with venture firms Natural Capital and Tribe Capital, closed its $345 million IPO in January and is now ready to explore deals with crypto-native companies worth between $2 billion and $10 billion, Tanuku said in an interview.
This may sound ironic, given that Kraken’s parent company Payward only this month delayed its long-awaited IPO as crypto markets collapsed: the CoinDesk 20 index (CD20) is on track for a sixth straight monthly decline. Tanuku declined to comment on Kraken’s IPO plans, but said he sees things like stablecoins and payments as the next best story after AI, and crypto as a clear survivor amid the total disruption hitting SaaS companies that have traditionally been part of the IPO pipeline.
SaaS’s existence now appears threatened by rapid advances in artificial intelligence and the potential for machines to write code – one of many areas of skilled labor that could be undone by AI.
“If you were a SaaS company and you wanted to go public and you didn’t go public, you have a bigger problem now, which is whether or not you have an answer to AI,” Tanuku said in an interview. “It’s not like crypto or bitcoin going from 70k to 80k. It’s a more existential, long-term question that’s much harder to shake.”
So if the money not being invested in AI is not going to SaaS, does that mean crypto is next? Not really, Tanuku said. But that means investors are looking elsewhere to deploy.
“What I will say is that the digital asset theme is probably one of the strongest secular stories in the market after AI … AI is the best story. No one will deny that,” he said.
So what kind of crypto-native opportunities is KRAK looking at, and does it include much in the way of AI crossover?
Tanuku said he is looking at areas where crypto and AI naturally intersect. He cited the well-documented excitement over AI agent trading and also raised the possibility of tokenization helping to fuel AI’s growth.
“I’m curious if somebody doesn’t start floating tokens to figure out how to finance some of this infrastructure because the build-out is so expensive that there might be interesting ways to give people dividends and returns in a tokenized way,” Tanuku said.
