2025 in review

Welcome to Orion VC's latest updates. Please share this newsletter with anyone who might benefit from it. If this is your first time reading, we encourage you to subscribe.

Thesis

Throughout 2025, we have maintained a deliberate strategic focus on artificial intelligence across three core domains: AI infrastructure, Vertical AI, and Physical AI. We partner with deeply technical founders building in hard-to-build industries where real complexity creates durable competitive advantages. We believe long-term value compounds where proprietary data, engineering depth, and real-world deployment converge. The portfolio we are constructing today is positioned at the intersection of these powerful trends, where disciplined technical risk-taking and early conviction will deliver outsized returns as AI fundamentally reshapes how industries operate and create value.

Portfolio

All four portfolio companies were backed in stealth, well before momentum was obvious or narratives were formed. Since then, every company has raised follow-on capital, including participation from Mucker Capital, Hustle Fund, and others. Orion VC led two of these rounds. These outcomes reflect early conviction, disciplined entry, and the ability to underwrite technical risk ahead of the market. We take particular pride in seeing strong external validation while founders continue to execute against ambitious, long-term visions. At year-end, one of our physical AI companies secured a $900K grant for development, further demonstrating the market’s recognition of the technologies we are backing. More to be announced in January - stay tuned!

Events

In 2025, we actively built founder and investor communities through online and in-person events across San Francisco, Europe, Yerevan, and global online formats. We hosted and curated discussions with operators and investors including Vincent Vanhoucke (Waymo), Matt Vail (OpenAI), Jason Cui (a16z), Anton Trubakov (QuantumLight), Juan Ignacio García Braschi (Cabify, L40º Tech M&A), Nick Tippmann (TipTop VC), Dion Lisle (Nour Capital), and many others. These gatherings brought together our portfolio founders, investors, advisors, and the broader ecosystem to shape conversations around the future of AI, infrastructure, and robotics.

Articles

Our Partner, Armen wrote about how AI defensibility is moving beyond data scale toward agentic systems, where reinforcement learning environments, reward design, and evaluation infrastructure define the real moat. As models commoditize, the advantage shifts to the context in which agents learn and adapt. Link: https://content.orionvc.co/the-future-of-defensibility

Martin, IR Partner, focused on data moats in practice, showing why owning high-quality, domain-specific data and building unified “golden data layers” matters across robotics, healthcare, AVs, and vertical SaaS. The core message is simple: models can be copied, data control cannot, and defensibility compounds where data gravity is strongest.

Wishes

We’re deeply grateful to our partners, LPs, and advisors for the trust, sharp feedback, and long-term alignment. Your perspective makes us more disciplined and more ambitious at the same time. Onward to a successful 2026. We’re building for the long game, and we’re just getting started.

Thanks for reading! You can follow us on LinkedIn for the latest. You can also join our journey by reaching out to us. Comment here or contact me or Armen Fljyan.

Moving forward together

Orion VC team