Don’t be fooled by crypto’s prolonged bear market, the industry remains a sound investment and less threatened by AI replacement than traditional software-as-a-service (SaaS) operations, according to Ravi Tanuku, CEO of KRAKacquisition Corp. (KRAKU), a blank check company backed by American crypto exchange Kraken.
The company, a Nasdaq-listed special purpose acquisition company (SPAC) sponsored by Kraken with venture firms Natural Capital and Tribe Capital, closed its $345 million IPO in January and is now ready to explore deals with native crypto companies valued between $2 billion and $10 billion, Tanuku said in an interview.
This may seem ironic, given that Kraken’s parent company, Payward, only this month delayed its highly anticipated IPO as crypto markets collapsed: The CoinDesk 20 Index (CD20) is on track for a sixth consecutive monthly decline. Tanuku declined to comment on Kraken’s IPO plans, but said he sees things like stablecoins and payments as the best story after AI, and crypto as a clear survivor amid the total disruption hitting SaaS companies, which have traditionally been part of the IPO pipeline.
The very existence of SaaS now appears threatened by rapid advances in artificial intelligence and the potential of code-writing machines – one of many areas of skilled labor that could be destroyed by AI.
“If you were a SaaS company and you wanted to go public and you didn’t, you have a bigger problem now, which is whether or not you have an answer for AI,” Tanuku said in an interview. “It’s not like crypto or bitcoin going from 70,000 to 80,000. It’s a more existential, longer-term question that’s much harder to shake.”
So if the money that isn’t invested in AI isn’t going to SaaS, does that mean the next step will be crypto? Not really, says Tanuku. But that means investors are looking for other places to expand.
“What I would say is that the digital assets theme is probably one of the strongest secular stories in the market after AI… AI is the best story. Nobody is going to deny that,” he said.
So what kind of crypto-native opportunities is KRAK looking at, and does it include much in terms of AI crossover?
Tanuku said he is studying areas where cryptography and AI naturally intersect. He mentioned the well-documented excitement around AI agent commerce and also raised the possibility that tokenization could help fuel AI growth.
“I’m curious if someone doesn’t start launching tokens to figure out how to finance some of this infrastructure, because it’s so expensive to build that there might be some interesting ways to provide people with returns and yields in tokenized ways,” Tanuku said.
