Don't let the prolonged crypto bear market fool you, said Ravi Tanuku, CEO of KRAKacquisition Corp. (KRAQ), a blank-check company backed by U.S. crypto exchange Kraken. He argued the industry is a sounder investment than traditional Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) firms and far less threatened by artificial intelligence.
KRAQ, a Nasdaq-listed SPAC sponsored by Kraken alongside venture firms Natural Capital and Tribe Capital, completed its $345 million IPO in January and is now hunting for crypto-native companies valued between $2 billion and $10 billion. Tanuku acknowledged the irony: Kraken's parent Payward delayed its long-awaited IPO this month, and the CoinDesk 20 Index is on track for a sixth straight monthly drop. Still, he sees stablecoins and payments as the next big narrative after AI, and crypto as a clear survivor amid the disruption hammering SaaS — once a core part of the IPO pipeline.
SaaS Facing Existential Crisis, Crypto Not So Much
“If you were a SaaS company and you wanted to go public and you didn't go public, you have a bigger problem now — whether you have an answer for AI,” Tanuku said. “That's not like crypto or bitcoin going from 70k to 80k. It's a more existential, longer-term question.” The rapid advance of AI in writing code is threatening the very existence of SaaS, he noted, while crypto does not face the same kind of technological displacement risk.
Crypto as the Strongest Secular Bet After AI
Does that mean money not going into AI will flow into crypto? Not exactly, Tanuku said, but it does mean investors are searching for other places to deploy capital. “The digital-asset thematic is probably one of the stronger secular stories in the market after AI. AI is the best story. Nobody's going to deny that,” he said. Crypto is not directly competing with AI for capital, but its structural appeal is rising.
Betting on the Intersection: AI Agents and Tokenization
Tanuku said KRAQ is looking at areas where crypto and AI naturally intersect, citing the buzz around AI agentic commerce and how tokenization could help finance AI infrastructure. “I'm curious if somebody doesn't start to float tokens to figure out how to finance some of this infrastructure, because the build-out is so expensive. There might be interesting ways to provide people yield and returns in a tokenized manner,” he said. When traditional funding paths narrow, crypto-native financing tools could become a game-changer.