Venture capitalists have spent the last few years hunting for the next great AI startup. Increasingly, they’re also using AI to scout for the next OpenAI or Anthropic.
Early-stage investors are weaving chatbots and agents into nearly every part of the job: mapping markets, stress-testing ideas, preparing for board meetings, and turning call transcripts into searchable knowledge bases.
Business Insider asked investors from this year’s Seed 100 and Seed 40 lists about how they use AI in their day-to-day work and which tools they rely on most. The following has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
For building a second brain
Salil Deshpande, general partner at Uncorrelated Ventures:
“I taught my AI agent to run my entire back office. It handles scheduling end-to-end, runs email campaigns, and triages my incoming LinkedIn invitations, auto-accepting portfolio founders and relevant VCs while surfacing others for review. “It acts as a ‘portfolio doctor.’ Anyone on my team and my investors can email with ‘portfolio doctor’ in the subject line to ask a question like, ‘What’s the ARR or Cast.ai?’ It will dig through the board decks and investor updates in my Dropbox, synthesize an answer with specific citations, and reply to the email thread.”
Ann Miura Ko, partner at Floodgate:
“First, I spent the last few months visiting a dozen AI-native companies in person to document how they actually operate, from 4-person startups to Ramp. I use AI to ingest all of these field notes, cross-reference them across companies, and surface patterns I’d never see from any single visit. “This has become the empirical backbone of my analysis of the AI-pilled startup. The patterns are converging in ways that are reshaping how I evaluate investments and founders.”
For finding new investments
Anne Dwane, cofounder and general partner at Village Global
“Agentic workflows help us pinpoint the ‘first-call’ angels in today’s most promising founder ecosystems. Networks don’t stay fresh on their own; AI helps us continuously extend ours into emerging talent pools.”
Alex Bard, managing director at Redpoint Ventures:
“We use internal AI systems to identify high-potential founders leaving top companies and detect early momentum signals in inception-stage startups (e.g., hiring velocity, product launches, network activity), giving us a sharper edge in sourcing before companies are widely visible.”
Sarah Smith, general partner at Sarah Smith Fund:
“I’ve built a custom 100-point AI scoring framework to evaluate every inbound opportunity and decide whether to take a first meeting. It systematizes my thesis around backing ‘irrationally intense’ founders with particular weight on the Stanford ecosystem, founder-market fit, and early signs of exceptional achievement.”
For coding internal tools
Lan Xuezhao, founder and managing partner at Basis Set:
“All of my team are engineers, and we have been launching and building weekly with AI since 2017.”
Janet Bannister, founder and managing partner at Staircase Ventures:
“I use AI to automatically generate a daily schedule briefing which includes for each meeting: the objective, attendees (including LinkedIn profiles of people I do not know), background context based on previous emails and meetings, and links to appropriate documents.”
Jeff Fluhr, venture partner at Craft Ventures:
“I use AI every day to turn venture ideas into real products. Beyond researching companies and technologies, I use AI coding tools to prototype my own startup ideas so I can evaluate them more fully and decide whether to bring them to life. In the last four months, I’ve built four such products. That has changed how I evaluate new ideas: instead of debating them in the abstract, I can get to a working prototype quickly and see what actually holds up.”
Shan-Lyn Ma, cofounder and co-CEO of Zola:
“I’m pushing myself to adopt an AI-first mindset across everything I do, both at work and in my personal life. I built a custom ‘Gem’ in Gemini that tracks any new fundraising or exit news from any day of the roughly 50 portfolio companies I’ve invested in to provide me with a daily summary.”
For prepping for pitches
Henry McNamara, partner at Great Oaks Venture Capital:
“Being able to use natural language to ask very specific questions and get hard data back helps prepare for every pitch I take. Given we are a generalist firm taking pitches in many different industries, I am definitely more informed and prepared for pitches than I was a few years ago. “I like using Claude to steelman my reasoning and logic for investing or passing. It helps bring in all types of different data to test ideas, biases, and blind spots before we debate them internally as a team.”
Sara Deshpande, general partner at Maven Ventures:
“Perplexity is my new teammate. I use it for everything: market research, market sizing, competitive research, target investor lists, learning more about founders, prepping pre-reads before meeting a new company.”
Jon Soberg, CEO and managing partner at MS&AD Ventures:
“If I see a company that I really like, I’m able to scan the market quickly to get a feel for the competitive landscape, which is more important than ever in our increasingly AI-native world.”
For spending more time IRL
Julie Lein, managing partner at Urban Innovation Fund:
“More than anything, AI made our team deeply aware of the importance of humanity in the tech and startup world. As a result, we’ve been leaning even more aggressively toward in-person events, founder meetings, coffee chats, and beyond. Because, in the age of AI, the only thing that stands out is real human-to-human interaction.”
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