Don’t be fooled by the prolonged crypto bear market, according to Ravi Tanuk, CEO of KRAKacquisition Corp. (KRAKU), a blank check company backed by US cryptocurrency exchange Kraken. The industry remains a sound investment, with less risk of AI replacement than traditional software-as-a-service (SaaS) operations.
The company, a Nasdaq-listed special purpose acquisition company (SPAC) sponsored by Kraken along with venture firms Natural Capital and Tribe Capital, completed a $345 million IPO in January and is now poised to explore deals with crypto-native companies worth between $2 billion and $10 billion, Tanuk said in an interview.
This may seem ironic, considering that Kraken’s parent company Payword only postponed its long-awaited IPO this month in the wake of the crypto market collapse: The CoinDesk 20 Index (CD20) is on a six-month losing streak. Tanuku declined to comment on Kraken’s IPO plans, but said he sees stablecoins, payments, etc. as the best story next to AI, and that cryptocurrencies will definitely survive the all-out disruption hitting SaaS companies that traditionally form part of the IPO pipeline.
Saas’s very existence now appears to be under threat from rapid advances in artificial intelligence and the possibility of machines writing code, one of the many areas of skilled labor that could be undone by AI.
“If you’re a SaaS company and you wanted to go public and you didn’t go public, you now have a bigger question: Do you have the answer to AI?” Tanuk said in an interview. “This isn’t like cryptocurrencies or Bitcoin going from 70,000 to 80,000. This is more of an existential, long-term issue, and it’s much harder to shake.”
So if the money not invested in AI doesn’t end up in SaaS, does that mean cryptocurrencies are next? No, Tanuk said. But that means investors are looking elsewhere for expansion.
“What I’m saying is that the digital asset theme is probably one of the stronger secular stories in the market after AI… AI is the best story. No one would deny that,” he said.
So what kind of crypto-native opportunities is KRAK considering, and does it include a lot of AI crossover?
Tanuk said he is focusing on areas where cryptocurrencies and AI naturally intersect. He cited the well-documented excitement around AI agent commerce and also mentioned the potential for tokenization to drive AI growth.
“I would be interested to see if someone starts floating tokens to find a way to fund some of this infrastructure. Construction is very expensive, so there may be interesting ways to provide yield and income to people in a tokenized way,” Tanuku said.
