Welcome to Altitude, the bi-monthly drop from Cirrus Capital Partners. We write for founders and finance pros building at the highest level. Expect sharp insights, market movers, and operator-grade tips.

The technology is powerful, the potential is vast, and the demos still dazzle. But when it comes time to actually implement AI inside business workflows—or justify it through the lens of a P&L—things start to crack.

This feels less like the confident rollout of a well-planned paradigm and more like a lurching first step into uncertain terrain—uneven, full of promise, but riddled with stumbles along the way.

Despite the strides we've made with AI, this is still the puberty stage. Still a lot of clunky, uneven, occasionally brilliant, but mostly uncertain work going on. Not bad, just still in its infancy.

Why 2025 feels like Inning 1 for AI

The last two years were all infatuation. In 2023 and 2024, capital flooded into AI with a kind of reckless euphoria.

If you had "GPT" in your pitch deck and a decent Figma mockup, you could raise money before writing a line of code. Every product team felt compelled to wedge LLMs into their stack—whether or not it served a purpose.

Now, halfway through 2025, that energy has turned. Users are unimpressed by "AI." Enterprise buyers are pulling back too.

AI-native startups are realizing that distribution wins markets, not novelty. A prime example is Jasper, which rocketed to early success with flashy copywriting demos but has since struggled with churn and defensibility—largely because they built a product that was easy to replicate and failed to lock in long-term distribution advantages.

It’s a familiar pattern. The early mobile app gold rush saw thousands of developers build for the app store without a clear business model. Most didn’t survive. AI today sits in that same liminal space—overhyped and under-delivering in equal measure. The gap between technical capability and operational value is widening.

Meanwhile, a chip shift signals the long game

As software stumbles through adolescence, hardware is quietly being reengineered beneath our feet.

In March 2025, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company pledged $100 billion to build five advanced chip fabrication plants in the U.S., on top of an already massive $65 billion commitment.

Soon after, the Trump administration doubled down on semiconductor independence, reshaping the CHIPS Act and launching the U.S. Investment Accelerator to streamline domestic production.

This is more than a symbolic move. While the average tech founder is still building lightweight tools that ping GPT-4 through a Zapier webhook, the real power shift is happening closer to the metal.

This is about who controls the flow of intelligence—not just the outputs, but the infrastructure itself.

Access to high-performance compute is on track to become faster, cheaper, and more localized. And when that happens, we’ll see a wave of AI-native software that isn’t constrained by latency, brittle APIs, or exorbitant cloud costs.

That future is taking shape but let's acknowledge that we're playing the long game, here. It won’t roll out evenly, either, but the scaffolding is already up.

So what should you be doing in the meantime?

For most of us, the answer lies in moving away from hype and building toward real-world utility.

In other words: Skip the gimmicks, ignore the noise, and focus on boring, high-leverage tools that actually move the needle.

Here’s the blueprint our fastest-moving AI clients and partners are following:

1. Start with a narrow, costly workflow

Don’t aim to disrupt entire verticals. Start with a clear, painful, measurable problem that’s already draining time or money. Look for processes that are being done manually today—those are your beachheads.

2. Use AI as an assistive layer

The most trusted tools act as copilots—not autopilots. Humans stay in control, but the system accelerates and enhances their actions. Trust is earned through clarity and consistency, not black-box automation.

3. Design for verification and transparency

Enterprise buyers want audit trails, explainability, and control. Don’t just show them what the AI does—show how it reached that conclusion, and make it adjustable.

4. Prioritize measurable outcomes over technical flash

Parameter size and token efficiency don’t matter in the boardroom. ROI does. Time saved, cost reduced, accuracy improved—these are the metrics that win stakeholders.

5. Embed into workflows people already use

Behavioral change is hard. Instead of inventing new ones, look for where your users already spend time—and make their existing actions faster, easier, or smarter.

6. Avoid the Agent Hype Trap

Autonomous agents that plan, execute, and adapt are exciting in theory. But in practice, they’ve struggled to deliver consistently.

Early experiments like Auto-GPT and BabyAGI sparked massive interest, but they quickly revealed how fragile these systems can be—looping endlessly, misinterpreting tasks, or stalling on simple decisions.

Even more recent tools promising multi-step automation still require heavy hand-holding to be usable in a live business environment. In practice, they’re unstable, hard to debug, and often create more mess than value.

The real breakouts will be boring

2025 isn’t really shaping up to be a year of miracle breakthroughs. It’s shaping up to be a year of refinement, focus, and foundational progress.

It's unglamorous to say, but this is the year of boring AI—the kind that quietly works behind the scenes, saves real hours, and earns user loyalty through competence, not cleverness.

The next breakout AI company probably won’t be celebrated for magic. It’ll be respected for usefulness, dependability, or helping thousands of people do their job better.

That’s where the future is being built—in the unseen trenches of utility, not the glow of the jaw-dropping demos.

And what it all means for you...

➞ AI hype has matured into operational pressure. What worked in 2023—wrappers and funding on big promises—is no longer enough. Time to switch from storytelling to infrastructure-building.

➞ Investors are recalibrating. In a capital environment where efficiency matters again, metrics like CAC, margin improvement, and retention are king. The founders who anchor AI in business reality—not novelty—will win.

➞ This cycle favors the quiet builders. The ones who resist the urge to chase hype and instead become indispensable in someone’s daily work. Utility + trust = compounding leverage that lasts.

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Newsworthy stories

• U.S. Copyright Office Pushes Back on AI Training Content. A new report challenges the legality of training commercial AI models on copyrighted works, arguing most uses likely exceed fair use. This could upend how LLMs are built and force developers to rethink datasets and licensing. » More​

• The Unicorn Multiplier: Immigrant Founders are Supercharging U.S. Innovation. Immigrant founders power nearly 50% of U.S. unicorn startups, with the majority relocating from countries like India, Israel, and Canada. This relocation dramatically boosts success—startups from India are 6.5x more likely to hit unicorn status after moving to the U.S. The trend isn’t isolated: founders from over 65 countries contribute to the U.S. innovation economy. The data proves a simple truth—America’s startup edge is often foreign-born. For global founders, moving to the U.S. is more than a visa play—it's a multiplier.

• Inside Look: Substack’s Tips for Creator-Driven Growth. Substack is a blueprint for modern distribution businesses—lean, creator-aligned, and anti-algorithm. Founders building platforms around user-generated value can learn from Substack’s tension between curation and scale. » More​

Founder tips

📌 From Palantir’s Nabeel Qureshi: “If a customer’s not using your product deeply within the first 30 days, they probably never will.” Don’t just onboard. Embed. Usage depth early on is a leading indicator of long-term success.

📌 Buffett-style investing values durability > growth. The most valuable product isn’t always the fastest growing, but the one with the widest moat and the least reinvention required each year.

📌 Alternative capital can quietly create invisible liens against your business. If you plan to raise equity later, investors will scrutinize your senior debt stack—even if your current lender didn’t frame it as “real debt.”

Financial markets

Meaningful market transactions

Recent Cirrus term sheets & transactions

$1.4M Term Loan & Revolver to a growth-focused, residential services company

$15M Senior Credit Facility to a specialty finance company to grow their balance sheet origination

$3M Delayed-Draw Term Loan Facility for a D2C consumer goods company

$500K AR Financing Facility to a specialty contractor

$2.5M Junior Secured Term Loan to a SaaS technology company

$1.5M AR Financing Facility to a company in the retail consumer goods segment; refinancing their existing senior lender

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To your growth,

Ryan Ridgway, Founder & Managing Partner

​Cirrus Capital Partners​