OpenAI operates as both an infrastructure company, by providing a cloud platform for models, and an application company with its consumer-facing ChatGPT product.

The high-performance database DuckDB took its team four years to write, creating a defensibility moat based on the expertise and time required for its development.

The COVID-19 pandemic accelerated the trend of bottoms-up, product-led growth adoption for developer tools and infrastructure.

Pylon, a customer support SaaS company, is fundamentally an infrastructure company built around a data pipeline to provide context to AI models.

Foundation model company Eleven Labs serves as both an application provider with a creator studio and an infrastructure provider via its voice AI API for enterprises.