Roughly 250 startups joined The Crunchbase Unicorn Board in the first half of 2026, and the pace of that wealth creation has raised a harder question for investors: how many of those businesses can hold onto customers after the initial excitement fades? Ilman Shazhaev, founder and CEO of Abu Dhabi-based AI and gaming infrastructure company Dizzaract, argues that a $1 billion valuation on paper sets too low a bar. He proposes a tougher benchmark, $1 billion in revenue sustained by customers who keep paying, and warns that annualized run rates assembled from discounts, experimental budgets or compute subsidies say little about whether buyers stay.
Shazhaev points to falling costs as one pressure on AI startups. He writes that since 2023 the price of reaching a fixed level of AI performance has dropped thirteenfold every year, leaving companies that merely resell model access exposed to severe price competition. He cites OpenRouter's $113 million Series B, noting that developers can already switch between models through a single shared interface. Businesses built on proprietary workflows face a different test, he argues, because software woven into a company's approvals, records and daily decisions is harder to replace than the underlying model. His suggested checks are whether customers renew at full price, expand their contracts, and whether margins hold up after inference costs.
Funding across regions is part of the strategy he outlines. Because a local backer can also serve as a route into a market, Shazhaev says founders should raise where their customers are, since enterprise sales still depend on local budgets, procurement rules and relationships. He offers the $30 million Series A for London- and Gulf-based 1001 AI as an example. U.S. venture firm Lux Capital led the round alongside Saudi PIF-backed Sanabil Investments, a deal he says shows capital, talent and customers can sit on different maps, with engineers in London and customers in the Gulf. He advises founders to ask every investor what they bring beyond money.
Shazhaev also draws a distinction between traditional venture funding and sovereign-backed money based on the obligations attached to each check. Venture firms need returns within a fund's life, he writes, which puts commercial momentum and a sizable exit at the center of their decisions and can sharpen execution, though it can backfire when founders chase expansion without counting delivery costs. Sovereign-backed investors, he says, tend to ask where user data is processed and which technical capabilities stay in the country, and some carry an explicit domestic development mandate. The upside is a partner focused on local infrastructure and enterprise adoption; the costs can include longer diligence, localization spending and contract terms that make expansion elsewhere harder.
Shazhaev's own background includes five years at Harbin Institute of Technology and Shanghai Jiao Tong University. Dizzaract describes itself as the largest game development studio in the Middle East, and Shazhaev is a United Nations expert under the UNODC program, the author of 46 scientific articles and holder of 10 registered invention patents. He recommends that founders read the fine print on governance rights, exclusivity requests and promised commercial introductions before judging whether an investor's regional reach justifies the constraints.
The metrics he says matter most are net revenue retention, production deployments and margins after delivery costs. Shazhaev writes that he would rather show an investor a small cohort of customers renewing without discounts than a revenue forecast dependent on the next funding round. Market sentiment, he notes, will keep minting and erasing paper unicorns every quarter, while the teams that build $1 billion in lasting annual revenue will likely pair venture momentum with regional obligations.
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