Venture capitalists are trained to protect anything that might give them an edge. Giving competitors access to the tools behind your own investment process therefore sounds counterintuitive. It is, after all, a business model built on delivering returns. Yet, earlier this year, at Sure Valley Ventures (SVV), we chose to open-source the AI workflows we use internally on the platform AgenticInvestor, which help us evaluate companies, prepare investment materials, and manage our investment process – for free.
Giving away tools to other investment firms that are used to improve our operational productivity might seem fallible. However, this assumption reveals a critical misconception sweeping through our industry about where competitive advantage in venture capital actually resides.
VC firms are competing in the wrong place
Venture capital is currently in the grips of an AI arms race, but many firms are hoarding the wrong weapons. There is sometimes a tendency to treat AI workflows, custom prompts, and internal agents as proprietary intellectual property. But the reality is that these technical capabilities will quickly become commoditised across the industry and the winners of the next decade will not be the firms with the most closely guarded ChatGPT prompts.
AI implementation can provide an operational advantage today, but the underlying tools and generic workflows will not remain scarce. The more durable advantages lie in the data a firm has accumulated, the judgement it applies, the access it has earned and the trust it has built with founders. The whole startup and VC investment ecosystem is built on the cyclical nature of talent; founders become investors, investors become founders, and serial entrepreneurs continue to create companies. By treating basic AI workflows as a secret sauce, VCs are distracting themselves from the uniquely human elements of investing.
How VCs are using AI
To understand the future of our industry, we must look at what investors are currently getting wrong. While 34% of venture firms in Europe now use AI to summarize due diligence materials and 26% use it to identify relevant deals, many are still treating AI merely as a glorified research assistant or chatbot.
The next phase is for AI use is agentic execution where AI systems will carry out meaningful, multi-step work throughout the investment process. But the hardest step is moving from isolated chatbot queries to embedding AI agents into reliable, repeatable workflows.
Over the last year, we have refined this approach to identify the key areas where this can have the greatest impact and our early data demonstrates a significant shift in productivity:
- Accelerated screening: company screening is now completed twice as quickly.
- Process efficiency: we unlocked substantial time savings with preparing due diligence packs and managing follow-ups with founders.
- Data integrity: we saw marked improvements in the accuracy and consistency of our CRM records.
Any VC can achieve these notable shifts in productivity by introducing agentic frameworks. And the impact is ultimately felt by the founders who have access to more VCs with more time.
Why we opened our playbook
As an AI-native firm, we are acutely aware of the potential, as well as the limits, of AI in various sectors. As such, we continuously experiment with the technology to understand how we can do our jobs better and allow us to spend more time getting out there meeting portfolio founders and prospective companies.
Rather than keeping our internal processes behind closed doors, we believe that sharing this practical AI infrastructure that we have created over many iterations to find the most effective frameworks can raise the productivity floor across the entire venture ecosystem. If other firms can more effectively use AI, ultimately, the whole ecosystem – both founders and investors – benefits.
Time is an investor’s most valuable asset, yet too much of it is consumed by repeatable operational work. Automating these processes using AI gives firms that time back, allowing them to compete where it matters most: evaluating opportunities and supporting founders.
Venture capital is already starting to see the most significant operating shift in its history. The next generation of VC firms will operate fundamentally differently – not by replacing investors with algorithms, but by eliminating the operational drag that limits their capacity. I firmly believe that AI is here to support, not replace, human judgement and to clear the path to focus on the decisions that actually generate outsized returns.
