Don't be fooled by the prolonged crypto bear market, the industry remains a sound investment and less at risk from replacement by AI than traditional software as a service (SaaS) operations, according to Ravi Tanuku, CEO of KRAKacquisition Corp. (KRAKU), a blank check company backed by U.S. crypto exchange Kraken.

The company, a Nasdaq-listed special purpose acquisition company (SPAC) sponsored by Kraken with venture firms Natural Capital and Tribe Capital, closed its $345 million IPO in January, and is now ready to explore deals with crypto-native firms valued between $2 billion and $10 billion, Tanuku said in an interview.

This might sound ironic, given that Kraken's parent Payward only this month delayed its much-anticipated IPO as crypto markets collapsed: The CoinDesk 20 Index (CD20) is on track for a sixth straight monthly drop. Tanuku declined to comment on Kraken’s IPO plans, but said he sees things like stablecoins and payments as the next best story after AI, and crypto as a clear survivor amid the total disruption hitting SaaS companies, which traditionally formed part of the IPO pipeline.

Saas' very existence now seems to be under threat from rapid advancements in artificial intelligence and the potential for machines to write code — one of many areas of skilled labor that could be undone by AI.

“If you were a SaaS company and you wanted to go public and you didn't go public, you have a bigger problem now, which is whether or not you have an answer for AI,” Tanuku said in an interview. “That's not like crypto or bitcoin going from 70k to 80k. It’s a more existential, longer-term question that is much harder to shake.”

So if the money that's not being invested in AI isn't going to SaaS, does that mean crypto's next up? Not really, Tanuku said. But it does mean investors are looking for other places to deploy.

“What I would say is 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.

So what sort of crypto native opportunities is KRAK looking at, and does it include much in the way of AI crossover?

Tanuku said he’s looking at areas where crypto and AI naturally intersect. He mentioned the well-documented excitement over AI agentic commerce, and also raised the possibility of tokenization assisting in feeding AI’s growth.

“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,” Tanuku said.