AI Revolutionizes Startup Investment Strategies

AI as an Ally for Startup Investors

Optimizing Administrative Tasks

Salil Deshpande, general partner at Uncorrelated Ventures, has integrated AI into the management of his office. He has taught his AI agent how to handle all of his administrative operations. This agent manages end-to-end appointment scheduling, oversees email campaigns, and sorts incoming LinkedIn invitations. It automatically accepts requests from founders in his portfolio and relevant investors while highlighting those that require special attention. Additionally, this agent acts as a "portfolio doctor." Team members and investors can send an email with "portfolio doctor" in the subject line to ask questions like "What is the annual recurring revenue of Cast.ai?" The agent then searches through board documents and investor updates stored in his Dropbox, synthesizes a response with specific citations, and replies directly in the thread.

Trend Analysis and Investment Evaluation

Ann Miura Ko, partner at Floodgate, has spent the past few months visiting a dozen AI-native companies in person, ranging from four-person startups to firms like Ramp. She uses AI to ingest all these field notes, cross-reference them among companies, and uncover patterns she would never have seen during a single visit. This has become the empirical backbone of her analysis of "AI-pilled" startups. The patterns converge in ways that reshape her approach to evaluating investments and founders.

Detecting Investment Opportunities

Anne Dwane, co-founder and general partner at Village Global, explains that agentic workflows help her identify "first-call angels" in today's most promising founder ecosystems. Networks do not sustain themselves; AI helps her continuously expand hers into new pools of emerging talent. Alex Bard, managing director at Redpoint Ventures, uses internal AI systems to identify high-potential founders leaving large companies and detect early momentum signals in early-stage startups, such as hiring speed, product launches, and network activity, giving him a sharper edge in sourcing before companies become widely visible.

Sarah Smith, general partner at Sarah Smith Fund, has built a 100-point AI evaluation framework to assess each incoming opportunity and decide whether to arrange a first meeting. This system systematizes her thesis around supporting "irrationally intense" founders, with a particular focus on the Stanford ecosystem, founder-market fit, and early signs of exceptional achievement.

Developing Internal Tools

Lan Xuezhao, founder and managing partner at Basis Set, emphasizes that all team members are engineers and have been launching and building weekly projects with AI since 2017. Janet Bannister, founder and general partner at Staircase Ventures, uses AI to automatically generate a daily briefing of her schedule, which includes the objective for each meeting, participants (including LinkedIn profiles of people she does not know), context based on previous emails and meetings, and links to relevant documents.

Jeff Fluhr, venture partner at Craft Ventures, uses AI daily to turn venture capital ideas into real products. Beyond researching companies and technologies, he employs AI coding tools to prototype his own startup ideas to evaluate them more fully and decide whether to bring them to fruition. Over the past four months, he has built four such products. This has changed his way of evaluating new ideas: instead of debating them abstractly, he can quickly obtain a functional prototype and see what truly holds up.

Shan-Lyn Ma, co-founder and co-CEO of Zola, pushes herself to adopt an AI-driven mindset in everything she does, both at work and in her personal life. She has built a custom 'Gem' in Gemini that tracks any new fundraising or exit news from one of the approximately 50 companies in her portfolio, providing her with a daily summary.

Preparing for Presentations and Strategic Decisions

Henry McNamara, partner at Great Oaks Venture Capital, highlights that the ability to use natural language to ask very specific questions and obtain concrete data helps him prepare for every presentation he receives. Given that his firm is generalist and receives proposals across many different sectors, he feels definitely better informed and prepared for presentations than he did a few years ago.

He enjoys using Claude to bolster his reasoning and logic for investing or passing. This helps integrate all kinds of different data to test ideas, biases, and blind spots before debating them internally with his team.

Sara Deshpande, general partner at Maven Ventures, considers Perplexity her new teammate. She uses it for everything: market research, market sizing, competitive research, target investor lists, learning more about founders, and preparing pre-reads before meeting a new company.

Jon Soberg, CEO and managing partner at MS&AD Ventures, explains that when he sees a company he really likes, he can quickly scan the market to get a sense of the competitive landscape, which is more important than ever in our increasingly AI-native world.

Importance of Human Interactions

Julie Lein, general partner at Urban Innovation Fund, asserts that more than anything, AI has made her team deeply aware of the importance of humanity in the world of technology and startups. As a result, they have turned even more aggressively toward in-person events, meetings with founders, discussions over coffee, and beyond. Because, in the age of AI, the only thing that stands out is genuine human-to-human interaction.