You don’t have to sit through a lot of pitches before your will-to-live-o-meter points to “kill me now.” Imagine you’re a VC, sitting through your fifteenth pitch that day — are you still going to be enthusiastic? Probably not. So what happens if you could instead feed your pitch deck into a chatbot that gives you feedback, suggestions and eventually invests some money into your fledgling idea? That’s the idea behind AIVC, a brand new, AI-powered VC firm.
Going through the automated pitch process is surprisingly fun, but — spoiler alert — at some point very early on in the process you’ll realize it’s a joke.
“We are part of the early stage technology world,” one of the bot’s creators told me. “We believe our world is too heavily influenced by investor discussion that aims to be independent and analytical, but is actually driven by FOMO and pattern recognition. It’s populated by founders overly focused on winning investments, rather than building great companies.”
A joke, sure, but like all good comedians, it does make a rather splendid point: It is harder for founders who don’t fit the standard patterns to raise money — and that’s a discussion we ought to be having.
In addition, there’s definitely something to be said for heavily data-driven investments in the startup world. High-frequency traders have been relying on algorithms and data for forever. Over here in startup land, increased interest in data services like Mattermark, AngelList and our own CrunchBase make me think that it’s only a question of time before VC investing will be AI-enhanced before long. Who knows, maybe we’ll have AIs signing checks soon, too.
Oh look! There’s a comment field below! What do you think the future of venture investment brings?