Devin Parekh has co-run the heavyweight investment firm Insight Partners for 26 years. Unlike many VCs who are loud on X and seem to live on podcasts, Parekh and Insight Partners tend to lay low.
In this sit-down with TechCrunch at its StrictlyVC event on Thursday night in New York, Parekh was refreshingly candid about some of the firm’s wins (it has led and co-led numerous rounds in Databricks, for example, and owns stakes in OpenAI and Anthropic); the deals it hasn’t won, including buzzy AI legal-tech company Legora; conflicts of interest in venture investing; and why Insight has stuck to a diversified strategy even as VCs have piled into the frontier AI labs.