Last fall, as venture capitalists were sinking record sums into artificial intelligence, a group of investors gathered to appraise a new startup. The company, Infinity Artificial Intelligence Institute, made software to automatically tune AI models, making them faster and cheaper. The founding team seemed strong, and the market was rapidly expanding. Half of the investors were cautious; the other half saw dollar signs. One of them dubbed the deal an “absolute banger.”
This startup was real, and so was the $100,000 the VCs invested in its seed round. But the VCs themselves were all AI agents, part of a new platform called ADIN, the Autonomous Deal Investing Network.
Launched in 2025, ADIN uses AI to replace the human analysts involved in venture dealmaking. Put in a startup’s pitch deck, and out comes a detailed analysis of its business model and founding team, a list of diligence questions and compliance risks, an estimate of the total addressable market, and a suggested valuation. ADIN has about a dozen different agentic investors, each with a distinct persona and investing thesis. The Tech Oracle looks at a startup’s underlying technology; the Unit Master evaluates the financial fundamentals; the Monopoly Maker, loosely based on Peter Thiel, looks for market dominance. When the majority of the agents like a startup, they suggest how much ADIN’s fund should allocate to the deal. The platform does this in about an hour, compared to the days or weeks that it takes an analyst at a VC firm.
“The game of venture doesn’t have a high success rate,” says Aaron Wright, the cofounder of ADIN’s parent company Tribute Labs. The current approach—a kind of finger-in-the-air, gut intuition about who and what will become the great unicorns of tomorrow—yields “home runs,” where a startup returns 10x or more of the invested capital, only about 1 percent of the time. Three-fourths of venture deals don’t even recover the cost of capital.
As Wright sees it, AI models could significantly improve those odds. He believes venture capital is entering its moneyball era, where quantitative methods overtake human intuition, and everyone starts to hit more home runs. “Increasingly, these systems will be able to eliminate bad projects, focus on those that are more successful, and also lower the cost of operating some of these enterprises,” Wright says. In a matter of years, he believes AI agents could be some of the best venture investors in the world.
And when that happens? “There may be no more Sand Hill Road.”
Few groups of people are more bullish on AI than venture capitalists, who collectively invested more than $200 billion into the AI sector last year. Advancements in AI models have transformed the way investors think about nearly every company, in nearly every industry. Vinod Khosla, the founder of Khosla Ventures, recently predicted that AI will replace 80 percent of job responsibilities by 2030. Yet many venture capitalists seem to underestimate the extent to which AI may impact their own jobs.
Marc Andreessen—the celebrity venture capitalist and cofounder of Andreessen Horowitz—said on an episode of his podcast, The Ben & Marc Show, that when AI is doing everything else, venture capital may be “one of the last remaining fields that people are still doing.” The job is more than just writing checks, he argued; it’s also choosing the right ideas, at the right time, with the right people, and then guiding them to success.
“That’s not science, that’s art,” Andreessen continued. “If it was a science, you could eventually have somebody who just dials it in and gets 8 out of 10. But in the real world, it’s not like that. You’re in the fluke business. There’s an intangibility to it. There’s a taste aspect.”
