Last fall, as venture capitalists were pouring record sums into artificial intelligence, a group of investors gathered to evaluate the modern startup. Infinity Artificial Intelligence Institute has created software to automatically tune AI models, making them faster and cheaper. The founding team seemed mighty and the market was growing rapidly. Half of investors were cautious; the other half saw dollar signs. One of them called the deal “an absolute hit.”
This startup was real, and so was the $100,000 the VCs invested in the seed round. But the VCs themselves were AI agents, part of a modern platform called AGEautonomous investment network.
Launching in 2025, ADIN uses artificial intelligence to replace human analysts involved in making venture deals. Post a startup pitch and you’ll get a detailed analysis of its business model and founding team, a list of questions about diligence and compliance risks, an estimate of the total addressable market, and a suggested valuation. ADIN has over a dozen different investor-agents, each with a distinct personality and investment thesis. Tech Oracle looks at the technology underlying the startup; The Unit Manager assesses the financial basis; Monopoly Maker, loosely based on Peter Thiel, seeks market domination. When most agents like a startup, they suggest how much the ADIN fund should allocate to the transaction. The platform does this in about an hour, compared to the days or weeks it takes for an analyst at a VC firm.
“The venture game doesn’t have a high success rate,” says Aaron Wright, co-founder of parent company ADIN Tribute Labs. The current approach – a kind of insightful intuition about who and what will become the great unicorns of tomorrow – results in a “home run” in which a startup returns 10 times or more of its invested capital in only about 1 percent of the time. Three quarters venture transactions do not even recover the cost of capital.
According to Wright, artificial intelligence models can greatly improve these chances. He believes that venture capital is entering the era of moneyball, where quantitative methods overtake human intuition and everyone begins to achieve more profits. “These systems will increasingly be able to weed out bad designs, focus on those that are more successful, and also lower the costs of operating some of these companies,” Wright says. In his opinion, within a few years, AI agents could become among the best venture capitalists in the world.
And when does this happen? “There may not be a Sand Hill Road anymore.”
Few groups of people are more bullish on AI than venture capitalists, who have collectively invested more than 200 billion dollars last year in the AI sector. Advances in artificial intelligence models have changed the way investors think about almost every company, in almost every industry. Most recently, Vinod Khosla, founder of Khosla Ventures predicted that by 2030, artificial intelligence will replace 80% of professional duties. However, many venture capitalists seem to underestimate the extent to which AI could impact their own workplaces.
Marc Andreessen – a famed venture capitalist and co-founder of Andreessen Horowitz – said in one of the episodes of his podcast: Ben and Marc showthat while AI takes care of everything else, venture capital may be “one of the last areas people are still doing.” The job was more than just writing checks, he argued; it is also about selecting the right ideas, at the right time, with the right people, and then leading them to success.
“It’s not science, it’s art,” Andreessen continued. “If it were a science, eventually you could have someone just check it and get an 8 out of 10. But in the real world, that’s not the case. You’re in the fluke business. There’s an elusiveness to it. There’s a flavor aspect to it.”