We were.

When Forthtech was formed, the thesis was straightforward, even if the timing felt uncomfortable: the Fourth Industrial Revolution was not a future event. It was already underway. Deep learning was moving from research labs into real enterprise problems. Machine learning was beginning to reshape how organisations managed risk, communicated, and made decisions. The infrastructure was not yet mature. The tooling was rough. The market was full of enthusiasm and short on follow-through.

That gap — between acknowledging a transformation and actually backing it — was where we chose to operate.

Between 2010 and 2025, AI startups evolved from peripheral innovation actors into the central focus of global venture capital, with funding growth exceeding 40% compound annual growth rate over fifteen years. What that trajectory obscures is how uneven the early years were. In 2020, the capital was not yet flowing at scale into applied AI — into the companies solving real problems in risk, in communications, in decision intelligence. Most of the enthusiasm was concentrated in a handful of frontier labs and headline use cases. The applied layer, where 4IR would actually be lived by businesses, remained underfunded and underestimated.

We built our portfolio in that space. Companies developing AI and deep learning solutions not as research projects, but as products with enterprise customers, measurable outcomes, and defensible positions. We looked for founders who understood that the value of machine intelligence was not in the model — it was in what the model enabled.

This is an era-defining shift, comparable in scale to the rise of the internet or mobile, creating the potential to build large-scale global companies from anywhere in the world — and the difference now is that adoption is faster, more pervasive, and increasingly grounded in real enterprise demand rather than pure speculation. That description is accurate today. In 2020, it was a bet.

We made it. We are not claiming perfect foresight. We are saying that the signals were there for those paying attention — and that conviction, without the cover of consensus, is what early-stage investment actually requires.

The 4IR is no longer a thesis. It is the operating environment. We invested before it became obvious. That is the only time it makes sense to invest.