Welcome to another edition of AITechnology Top Voice, where we spotlight the leaders shaping the future of AI across industries. Today, we’re thrilled to feature Chon Tang, Founding Partner at SkyDeck Fund — an interview where he provides deep-level insights on how to succeed in the AI marketplace and what sets “some founders” apart from the rest.
Berkeley SkyDeck’s Demo Day for Batch 19 made waves this April as the Bay Area’s largest investor-startup showcase, drawing over 1,000 investors and spotlighting 22 global startups from seven countries. From cutting-edge B2B solutions to biotech, medtech, and next-gen AI, this cohort marked a turning point for SkyDeck—especially with the expansion of its Bio Track to the Bio + Health Track, embracing a wider spectrum of life science innovations.
In our latest AITechnology Top Voice conversation, Chon Tang, Founding Partner at SkyDeck Fund, called Batch 19 the most AI-driven cohort yet—not for flashy benchmarks, but for pioneering human-AI collaboration. “The true value of AI,” Tang shared, “is in integration, not substitution.” A standout example is Rhea’s Factory, led by PhD Arzu Sandıkçı, using AI to accelerate the design of enzymes that break down complex plastics—a breakthrough in sustainable tech.
Here’s the full interview.
AI Technology Insights (AIT): Hi, Chon, welcome to the AI Technology Top Voice Interview Series. Tell us about your company’s mission and the problem you’re solving in the AI space.
Chon Tang: Berkeley SkyDeck is the premier AI accelerator globally, uniquely positioned within UC Berkeley’s ecosystem. We bridge the gap between global founders and Berkeley’s unparalleled talent pool and resources without requiring any university affiliation. While Silicon Valley attracts countless entrepreneurs, success demands more than networking events. Where competitors offer surface-level connections, we provide deep, meaningful access to Berkeley’s AI expertise, research facilities, and talent pipeline. This integration creates a powerful launchpad for startups ready to scale in the world’s innovation hub.
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AIT: How has your journey with Berkeley SkyDeck shaped the startup growth in the US so far?
Chon Tang: While our core model has proven successful over seven years, we focus on strategic enhancements rather than major pivots. Within the next year, we’re launching a new fund to further solidify Berkeley SkyDeck as the global entrepreneurship hub.
Simultaneously, we’re deepening collaborations between founders and academic researchers – a critical initiative that maximizes our unique position at the intersection of research and commercialization. This expanded research integration will give our portfolio companies unprecedented access to emerging technologies before they reach the broader market, creating sustainable competitive advantages. Our goal isn’t to reinvent our model but amplify what works exceptionally well.
AIT: Batch 19 is being called SkyDeck’s most AI-driven cohort yet. What sets your AI innovation apart from the rest?
Chon Tang: The true economic value of AI lies not in achieving arbitrary benchmarks but in seamless human-AI integration. Creating effective collaboration models between humans and AI represents the highest-value challenge facing technology today.
This requires rethinking workflows, organizational structures, and interaction models to leverage their complementary strengths. The most successful implementations will enhance human capabilities rather than simply replace them, increasing productivity while creating new categories of high-value work.
As investors, we prioritize startups focusing on these collaborative approaches over those merely substituting AI for human roles, as they create more sustainable economic value and resilience against inevitable technological shifts. For example, in our latest cohort, Arzu Sandıkçı, PHD, with Rhea’s Factory is focused on using AI to enable the accelerated design of novel enzymes which can be used to recycle complicated plastic polymers, dramatically decreasing the amount of plastics going into landfills.
AIT: What tangible wins have startups achieved since joining the program? Would you like to share success stories or case studies from the medtech and biotech space?
Chon Tang: Cyphra Autonomy, for example, has now shipped its new coworker drone robots for the construction industry. Leveraging access to UC Berkeley’s Richmond Field Station (where drones can operate with relaxed regulatory rules), they’ve developed units that can safely operate with high autonomy.
We’re proud of the work we’re doing in the Bio and Health space. For example, with D.Sole. D.Sole is a clinical decision support system that uses smart foot insoles and an ML platform for early detection and monitoring of foot complications in diabetic patients. With our data-driven insights into patients’ feet, we can reduce foot complications by up to 98%, saving insurers an estimated $8 billion annually. Its wearable technology seamlessly integrates into everyday footwear, enabling remote monitoring and proactive healthcare management for diabetic patients. Since joining SkyDeck, their intelligent shoe implants have been deployed across hundreds of patients, helping prevent dangerous foot/tissue damage before it happens.
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AIT: What advice would you give to emerging founders looking to build in the AI space?
Chon Tang: AI will undoubtedly transform every industry and role, which, in turn, represents both exceptional tailwinds and formidable challenges for founders. On the positive side, you’ll find customers and investors eagerly making time for your story, as everyone is desperate to understand what’s coming next; your initial outreach will likely see conversion rates that would make traditional startups envious.
However, the flip side is brutal: expect hundreds of competitors flooding every vertical. Despite the AI revolution, you’ll still need to win the same way businesses have always won: delight customers with reliable, intuitive products that solve genuine problems and deliver measurable value.
To stand out, focus on three critical elements:
- Problem selection: Target an acute pain point where AI creates 10x improvement, not incremental gains. The best opportunities often combine domain expertise with AI capabilities.
- Sustainable differentiation: Build defensibility beyond your model. This could be proprietary data, network effects, or workflow integration that creates switching costs.
- Go-to-market clarity: Identify specific personas experiencing the problem you solve, and craft a story that resonates with their challenges. Even the most advanced technology needs effective distribution.
Remember that while AI is revolutionary, the fundamentals of company building remain unchanged: understand your customers deeply, deliver exceptional value, and build a sustainable business model. Those who balance technological innovation with business fundamentals will thrive.
AIT: New technologies such as Agentic AI are slated to take over the B2B customer service teams with their flawless delivery models. What are your thoughts on the future of AI-powered agents and customer contact center software markets?
Chon Tang: The transformation is inevitable, though it’s worth considering whether agentic AI represents disruption or merely accelerated evolution in customer service. Contact centers provide an ideal entry point for AI deployment—controlled environments with defined use cases and measurable outcomes. What makes this particularly compelling is that we’re not just seeing low-level task automation but increasingly sophisticated handling of complex customer interactions.
Beyond simple replacement economics, the more interesting story is how AI is reshaping the entire customer service value chain. While first-level support will likely see the most immediate impact, AI capabilities are rapidly advancing into higher-value enterprise functions—from proactive issue resolution to strategic customer success management.
The market implications are significant: we’ll see consolidation among traditional contact center vendors scrambling to embed AI capabilities, the emergence of specialized AI-native platforms built from the ground up for autonomous operation, and enterprise software giants integrating conversational intelligence across their entire stack.
The winners in this space won’t simply offer marginally better automation but will fundamentally reimagine customer engagement, creating systems that continuously improve through interaction, seamlessly escalate to humans when necessary, and deliver insights that transform how businesses understand their customers.
AIT: At AI Tech Insights, we focus on the companies that have embraced Ethical AI Development frameworks. As AI regulation becomes more prominent, how are you preparing for ethical and responsible AI deployment at SkyDeck Fund?
Chon Tang: UC Berkeley leads this space definitively, with cutting-edge research addressing these complex ethical challenges. We’ve embedded these considerations into our core due diligence framework, ensuring founders have thoroughly evaluated the long-term implications of their technology.
This approach isn’t merely virtuous posturing; it’s fundamental business strategy. Companies that proactively address ethical considerations avoid regulatory landmines, build sustainable customer trust, and ultimately protect shareholder value. Firms that view ethics as an afterthought invariably face existential crises when regulation inevitably catches up.
The most promising founders in our cohorts don’t view ethical frameworks as constraints but as competitive advantages that unlock markets others can’t responsibly serve. When we evaluate teams, their sophistication around these ethical dimensions often serves as a powerful signal of their strategic foresight and leadership maturity.
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AIT: How do you envision your company evolving over the next 12 months?
Chon Tang: Despite economic headwinds, innovation never slows down, and the current economic conditions make Berkeley SkyDeck’s comprehensive resources more valuable than ever for startups navigating their growth journey. Our unparalleled global reach enables us to discover groundbreaking ideas and technologies that might otherwise remain invisible to traditional venture capital channels.
Despite economic headwinds, innovation never slows down, and the current economic conditions make Berkeley SkyDeck’s comprehensive resources more valuable than ever for startups navigating their growth journey. Our unparalleled global reach enables us to discover groundbreaking ideas and technologies that might otherwise remain invisible to traditional venture capital channels. I’m particularly excited to see the transformative innovations our upcoming applicants will bring.
We’re also deepening our unique advantage through expanded collaborations between founders and Berkeley’s world-class academic researchers – a distinctive strength that separates SkyDeck from other accelerators worldwide. This strategic focus on connecting entrepreneurial vision with cutting-edge research creates an innovation ecosystem unmatched anywhere else globally.
AIT: How do you view the future of collaborative intelligence and human-AI partnerships?
Chon Tang: The future of AI isn’t about pursuing abstract benchmarks or achieving theoretical intelligence milestones in isolation. It’s about creating tangible value through thoughtful human-AI collaboration. The most significant challenge, and therefore the most incredible opportunity, lies in seamlessly integrating AI capabilities into existing workflows where they can meaningfully amplify human potential.
We’re discovering that the highest economic and social value emerges when we design AI systems that complement human strengths rather than attempting to replace them. The truly transformative breakthroughs will come from understanding the nuanced interplay between human expertise and AI capabilities, where AI handles routine tasks, processes vast datasets, and generates initial drafts. In contrast, humans provide strategic direction, apply contextual judgment, and make value-based decisions.
We’re only beginning to explore this frontier of collaborative intelligence, where the focus shifts from what AI can do alone to what humans and AI can accomplish together. This evolution toward partnership-based approaches represents a technological shift and a fundamental reimagining of how knowledge works in the 21st century.
AIT: What do you enjoy most about Demo Days?
Chon Tang: What energizes me most about demo days is witnessing the electric momentum created when our carefully selected 22 founders connect with over 600 forward-thinking investors. These founders have undergone an incredible transformation during their six-month journey with us, building ventures with truly game-changing potential that consistently attract enthusiastic investment.
But what truly sets the SkyDeck experience apart is our long-term partnership vision. We don’t just celebrate a single fundraising milestone—we’re committed to the full entrepreneurial journey. Watching these companies evolve from two-person startups to global enterprises with thousands of employees represents the ultimate fulfillment of our mission as the world’s premier accelerator. Each success story reinforces SkyDeck’s position as the definitive launchpad for tomorrow’s industry leaders.
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