AI Revolution in VC: 13 Rising Stars Share Their Secret Tech Toolkit

Unlock the power of AI in venture capital! Learn how 13 forward-thinking VCs are using tools like ChatGPT and Rogo to discover hidden gems, refine strategies, and accelerate their decision-making processes.

Unearthing New Investments

Venture capitalists are increasingly turning to AI to enhance their deal sourcing capabilities, moving beyond traditional methods. For instance, Miloni

Madan Presler from IVP utilizes AI to meticulously map emerging industry categories by analyzing vast datasets of company descriptions, research reports, and job postings. This process allows for the identification of non-obvious market adjacencies and niche opportunities, a strategy that directly led to their investment in Laurel. Similarly, Shruti Kumar of Tusk Ventures employs AI tools to pinpoint specific quality indicators in potential investments, significantly boosting their outbound sourcing capacity without increasing headcount. Coupled with AI-powered CRM features for identifying warm introductions and automating outreach, these technologies streamline the initial stages of the investment pipeline, ensuring a continuous flow of promising opportunities.

Accelerating Pitch Preparation

Getting up to speed rapidly before crucial investor meetings is now more efficient thanks to AI. Sophie Beshar, an investor at Insight Partners, finds AI invaluable for quickly grasping new market landscapes, key terminology, and pertinent trends, especially in unfamiliar sectors. This enables her to focus her due diligence effectively ahead of discussions with founders. Meera Oak from Alumni Ventures highlights the power of AI in information consumption, particularly for audio content. Using tools like NotebookLM's audio features, she transforms dense podcasts into concise, podcast-style briefings, allowing her to absorb core ideas and formulate pertinent questions during commutes or while running errands, thereby maximizing her preparation time.

Building a Digital Second Brain

Transforming high-volume conversations and documents into actionable insights is a key application of AI for VCs. Angèle Sahraoui at Slow Ventures describes call transcripts as a 'game-changer,' using AI to synthesize dense information from meetings. By creating dedicated AI channels for specific deals and uploading all related materials, including transcripts from tools like Granola, she can significantly reduce decision-making time while simultaneously improving the quality of those decisions. Manmeet Gujral of CapitalG leverages AI for transcribing meetings and processing saved documents and blog posts, enabling AI to 'reason' about this information for daily work. Beyond this, he even uses AI for creative coding projects, demonstrating a versatile integration of the technology into both professional and personal life.

Stress-Testing Deal Viability

Challenging one's own investment theses and assumptions is a critical step before committing capital, and AI is proving instrumental in this process. Lexi Henkel, a managing director at Maverick Ventures, employs AI tools like ChatGPT to actively seek out counterarguments and identify weaknesses in her logic and supporting data. By posing questions such as 'What would someone who disagreed with this poke holes in?' or 'How could someone react poorly to this news?', she engages in a back-and-forth dialogue that pushes her beyond confirmation bias and reveals potential blind spots. James Flynn, a partner at Sequoia Capital, highlights how tools like Rogo accelerate market diligence, providing rapid access to hard data and insights into public market investor sentiment through natural language querying, making the process significantly more efficient.

Mapping Industries with AI

Gaining a comprehensive understanding of new industries and identifying growth trajectories is significantly enhanced by AI's analytical capabilities. Adil Bhatia, a vice president at Redpoint Ventures, uses AI tools such as Deep Research and ChatGPT's thinking modes for in-depth market analysis. These tools serve as an excellent starting point for understanding market dynamics, historical constraints, and evolving trends, and are particularly useful for brainstorming how a company could achieve substantial growth. Max Abram, a partner at Scale Venture Partners, emphasizes how AI has revolutionized market learning. Instead of extensive manual research, he now engages iteratively with ChatGPT, uploading relevant materials to quickly grasp the current market state and explore hypotheses for startup entry and scaling, collapsing hours of work into focused AI interactions.

Reclaiming Time and Focus

Beyond direct deal-making and analysis, AI is playing a crucial role in streamlining operational tasks and freeing up valuable mental bandwidth for VCs. Sudhee Chilappagari, a principal at Battery Ventures, relies on tools like Wispr Flow, which allows for voice dictation of emails, documents, and even AI prompts, enabling the quick articulation of complex thoughts that AI can then refine while preserving the user's voice. Gloria Zhang, a vice president at DCM Ventures, finds AI useful for preparing for meetings and discussions while commuting. Christine Esserman, a partner at Accel, views AI's most significant contribution as handling the 'everything else'—the life administration tasks like meal planning, schedule organization, and logistical streamlining. By reducing this friction, VCs can remain more focused and present when critical decisions need to be made.