Every Company Is Becoming a Factory for Machine-Readable Information
Frontier AI labs started by digesting the internet, and now everyday apps are building their own factories on top.
David Senra · Lessons From Backing The Best Founders In Fintech | Micky MalkaAsk a payments executive, a search executive, and an AI researcher what a token is and you will get three different answers. Micky Malka, a fintech investor who runs Ribbit Capital, says they are all describing the same thing: information a machine can read.
Malka calls companies token factories. Like a factory in the industrial revolution that took in raw materials and shipped a finished product, a business today must take in a steady supply of tokens, do something useful with them, and deliver something new.
To deliver any product, promise, or service, Malka says, a company must understand identity, value, and intelligence. It must understand identity, meaning who the customer is. It must understand value, meaning what something is worth and how money or credit should move. And it must understand intelligence, meaning the knowledge and judgment that go into the decision.
The first clear factories, he argues, are the frontier AI labs. They sweep up online writing, videos, and other material from around the world, digest it, and turn it into a new set of tokens that other businesses can consume. In that sense, they are raw material suppliers for everyone else.
Now that factory model is moving from raw materials to finished goods. He points to companies such as ElevenLabs, Decagon, and Sierra, which are building their own token factories by offering services that did not exist before.
The end point, as Malka puts it, is "a world where every single piece of information" gets read over by a machine. So far, he says, money has stayed largely outside AI.
Questions people ask
What actually is a token inside an AI system?
In AI language models, a token is a small chunk of text, audio, video, or other data that has been converted into numbers the model can process. A word might be one token or several, and a video is broken into many visual tokens. That is why the same word covers payments, search, and AI: in each case, real-world information is being made machine-readable.
How is a Visa token different from an OpenAI token?
A payment token stands in for a credit card number so the real number is never exposed during a transaction. A search or AI token is a unit of meaning the computer uses to understand and generate language. Both hide messy real-world detail behind a standardized piece of machine-readable information, which is why Malka treats them as the same idea.
What do identity, value, and intelligence look like in an ordinary business?
Identity means proving you are you, usually through logins, biometrics, or business records. Value means recording what is owned, owed, or paid, from bank balances to loyalty points. Intelligence is the know-how applied to the other two, such as deciding whether a loan is safe or what answer best fits a customer.