Sarah Guo’s five startup ideas for AI in science, manufacturing, energy and chips

Sarah Guo of Conviction shares five startup theses while inviting founders to apply to the firm’s Embed program. The ideas focus on bottlenecks where software alone is not enough: automating biological validation inside owned labs, rebuilding manufacturing process knowledge, testing co-packaged optical components, standardizing remanufactured power transformers, and using learned search for analog chip design. Across the set, the central argument is that AI-native companies can create defensible businesses by pairing models with scarce real-world data, specialist workflows and physical infrastructure. It matters because these constraints increasingly shape progress in AI-for-science, robotics supply chains, data centers and semiconductors.