Daniel Malinovski on AI-Driven Startups at SiGMA AIBC

Daniel Malinovski, co-founder of Simplicity Group, joined the Successful AI-Driven Startups panel at SiGMA AIBC in Manila on 4 June 2025, from 13:45 to 14:15 at the SMX Convention Center.

The panel sat on the Investors and Startups track and was moderated by Leah Callon-Butler, Director at Emfarsis. Daniel spoke alongside Myrtle Anne Ramos, CEO of Block Tides, and Anton Golub, CBO at Freedx. SiGMA Asia 2025 ran from 1 to 4 June and drew more than 13,000 delegates across four days.

What the panel argued

The framing question was what separates AI startups that build a business from those that build a demo. The answer the panel kept returning to was distribution rather than model quality.

A team with a marginally better model and no route to customers loses to a team with an adequate model embedded in a workflow people already use. This is not specific to AI, but AI makes it sharper, because the underlying capability improves every few months for everyone at once. Any advantage that comes from the model erodes on that schedule, whereas an advantage that comes from proprietary data, a distribution partner or a workflow customers have already adopted does not.

Where investors were drawing the line

On the investor side, the recurring point was that AI has compressed the time between a convincing demo and a real product, and the two now look almost identical in a pitch. Diligence has moved accordingly: retention curves, usage frequency and what happens when the founder stops manually intervening.

Daniel's contribution came from the go-to-market side of Simplicity's practice, where the same pattern shows up in funded companies that have raised on a strong technical story and have no repeatable pipeline behind it. The fix is unglamorous. Define the ICP narrowly enough to be wrong about, build the data foundation to reach it, and measure whether the funnel produces the same result twice.

SiGMA Asia 2025 ran from 1 to 4 June at the SMX Convention Center, Manila.