TechCrunch StrictlyVC in Los Angeles spotlights AI, defense investing

TechCrunch’s StrictlyVC Los Angeles event filled The Aerospace Corporation Campus in El Segundo on Thursday, June 18, 2026, with investors, founders and operators talking bluntly about AI, defense technology and venture capital. The conversation later turned to pricing deals in a market moving at unprecedented speed, picking startups that can survive giant incumbents and what a SpaceX IPO could mean for Los Angeles.

Reum came to the stage as co-founder and partner at M13, the seed and Series A firm he started in 2016 with his brother Courtney Reum. M13 backs disruptive software businesses and has supported consumer companies that later became unicorns; the firm has $2.5 billion in assets under management and 17 unicorns among its seed or Series A bets. Reum framed the current cycle as harder than earlier waves like cloud and mobile because startups are not only fighting one another, but also taking on the biggest, best-capitalized tech companies in the market.

Chang Xu, a partner at Basis Set Ventures, said the AI market carries “both a bubble and not a bubble” at the same time. Xu previously was a principal at Upfront Ventures, worked as the first product manager at the Minerva Project and co-founded Onion Math, an ed-tech company that raised about $90 million. The firm launched in 2017 as one of the first early-stage funds focused exclusively on AI and is now investing out of its fourth fund, with nearly $1 billion in assets under management.

Xu said ChatGPT’s revenue growth and the growth rates of portfolio companies such as Open Art have reset expectations for what counts as strong performance in AI. She also warned against pricing every deal as if that pace will continue indefinitely, saying that approach does not hold up across an entire portfolio.