Non-technical founders with experienced outside vendor — ok?

I’m a non-technical cofounder of early stage startup. (“Non-technical” but I’ve developed multimedia courseware and led teams in the past (LMS, edu content, no code).

My question: how crucial is it that my other biz founder and I have a technical co-founder for our data- and AI-driven product rather than use an experienced vendor whose team has been doing machine learning and AI for 10 years?

During our manual work as consultants we have identified a problem in a niche market that can be solved via a combo of hard-to-gather data and AI (and other market-specific stuff that that we will train our LLM on). We’ve done market research, designed and validated the solution with potential customers in numerous interviews via click-through prototypes/wireframes, quantified TAM, SAM, SOM, written biz plan, etc. We have deep experience in our market having proven expertise over years.

But as we’ve been learning about fundraising (we hope to begin a seed round in early 2025) we continually hear about the importance of technical cofounder. We get it— but our product will only be half-developed by a technical dev team. The other aspect to the product is: gathering hard to find data, and figuring out relationships in the data — that we will do via mapping work with a cohort with unique expertise in our niche market.

Also our outside vendor is very reputable with years’ experience in AI and machine learning prior to the latest gen-AI craze — he’s not a newbie and has an established dev team. And our platform is not a consumer product but a more complicated SaaS product. Like, you can’t just code it by yourself.

Sure, in the long run we can hire/bring everything in house, but would investors shy away from working with us if our short-term dev effort does not have a “technical” co-founder? Thanks for your thoughts.