Ilman Shazhaev, Founder of Abu Dhabi AI Company Dizzaract: The True Test of a Unicorn Is Renewal at Full Price, Not Paper Valuation
In an article for Crunchbase News, Ilman Shazhaev, founder and CEO of Dizzaract, argues that the valuation threshold for AI startups should be raised to require $1 billion in sustained revenue with customers renewing at full price, rather than relying on paper valuations. He integrates the pricing pressure from a thirteenfold annual decline in AI performance costs, the switching difficulty created by workflow embedding, and the practical differences between sovereign capital and venture capital regarding localization obligations into a single capital strategy framework. He advises founders to select funding sources based on customer paths and to prioritize demonstrating small cohorts of full-price renewing customers over relying on revenue projections dependent on the next round of financing.
In the first half of 2026, 250 companies joined the Crunchbase unicorn list, making a $1 billion valuation seem increasingly attainable. But Ilman Shazhaev, founder and CEO of the Abu Dhabi-based AI and gaming infrastructure company Dizzaract, proposed a different benchmark: what truly matters is not the valuation, but whether the company can maintain $1 billion in sustained revenue from customers who renew at full price.
His reasoning begins with the structural changes in AI performance pricing. Citing research from Epoch AI, Shazhaev notes that since 2023, the cost to achieve a fixed level of AI performance has dropped thirteenfold every year. This means companies that simply resell model access face brutal price competition—OpenRouter’s $113 million Series B illustrates that developers can already switch between different models through a shared interface. In such an environment, ARR figures alone no longer indicate defensibility.
Shazhaev believes that what is truly hard to replace is not the underlying model, but software embedded in customer approval processes, records, and daily decision-making. His test method is specific: Do customers renew at full price? Are contracts expanding? Do margins remain healthy after deducting inference costs? These three questions reduce 'revenue' from vague annualized run rates to trackable business facts.