Sarah
Fu
Founder & Managing Partner at Elsa Capital
"From Pilots to Production: What Actually Works in Vertical AI for Financial Services"
"From Pilots to Production: What Actually Works in Vertical AI for Financial Services"
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Session: From Pilots to Production: What Actually Works in Vertical AI for Financial Services
Most vertical AI conversations focus on demos and possibilities. This session shares what actually works in production. As a San Francisco-based early-stage VC investor specializing in vertical AI for financial and professional services, Sarah has evaluated over 1,000+ and invested in 9 AI startups now serving Fortune 500 banks, asset managers, law firms, and enterprises. As a former YC-backed fintech founder and product leader at Stripe ($100B valuation), Sarah draws from deep pattern recognition across portfolio companies—including several that reached $3-10M revenue within their first year with multi-year contracts from the world's largest enterprises, including one startup so strategic that the Chairman of the Board sent a firm-wide letter to all employees about the partnership. Sarah will share the technical and operational frameworks that separate pilots from multi-year enterprise contracts: the agent design and guardrails that win enterprise trust in regulated environments, the evaluation metrics that actually matter to buyers beyond demos, and the change management realities of scaling from pilot to production. You'll leave with concrete frameworks for building vertical AI that ships, scales, and delivers measurable business impact.Key Takeaways
- From Pilot to Production Frameworks - Learn what help vertical AI startups convert enterprise trials into multi-year contracts
- Evaluation Metrics That Matter to Buyers - Discover what Fortune 500 decision-makers actually care about when adopting AI
- Pattern Recognition Across Deployments - Understand the technical and go-to-market strategies that enabled multiple startups to reach $3-10M ARR within their first year
Bio
Sarah Fu is the Founder and Managing Partner at Elsa Capital, a San Francisco-based early-stage venture firm backing startups building at the intersection of AI and fintech. Before launching Elsa Capital, Sarah was a product and business leader at Stripe for 4 years, helping scale it from $5B to $100B valuation. She helped build Stripe's flagship product, advised the C-suite on company-wide strategy, and led billion-dollar fundraising efforts. Her operator roots are further grounded in her experience as a founder, having built a fintech company backed by Y Combinator. Before venturing into tech, Sarah spent 10 years at leading financial institutions including Fidelity Investments, T. Rowe Price, and Morgan Stanley. oversaw $8B in investments in financial and business services companies at Fidelity and helped take Alibaba public in the largest U.S. IPO ever as an investment banker at Morgan Stanley, where she saw firsthand many of the manual tasks that AI could automate today. Sarah holds an MBA from Stanford Graduate School of Business, a B.S. dual degree in Bioengineering and Finance, summa cum laude, from the University of Pennsylvania, and is a CFA charterholder. She lives in San Francisco with her husband and two daughters.