Author: WIRED

Translation: Shen Chao TechFlow

Shen Chao Guide: Venture capitalists are the biggest believers in AI, collectively pouring over $200 billion into the AI sector last year. But an awkward question arises: Will AI itself disrupt VCs? A platform called ADIN has already replaced human analysts with AI Agents for investment due diligence, completing what originally took days or weeks in just one hour. The more fatal threat lies in another layer—when AI lowers the cost of entrepreneurship, founders may not need VC money at all. This article interviews several well-known VCs, presenting the real divisions and anxieties within the industry.

The full text is as follows:

Last autumn, venture capitalists were pouring into the artificial intelligence sector with record amounts, gathering together to evaluate a new project. This company is called Infinity Artificial Intelligence Institute, which makes software for automatically tuning AI models, making them faster and cheaper. The founding team looks good, and the market is rapidly expanding. Half of the investors are cautious, while the other half smell money. One of them called this deal a "surefire hit."

This company is real, and the $100,000 seed round invested by this group of VCs is also real. But these VCs are all AI Agents; they belong to a new platform called ADIN (Autonomous Deal Investing Network).

ADIN launched in 2025 and replaced human analysts in venture capital transactions with AI. Input a pitch deck from a startup, and it outputs a detailed analysis of the business model and founding team, a list of due diligence questions and compliance risks, a TAM estimate, and a suggested valuation. ADIN has over a dozen different Agent investors, each with unique personas and investment theses. Tech Oracle examines underlying technology, Unit Master assesses financial fundamentals, and Monopoly Maker looks for market monopoly opportunities largely based on Peter Thiel's style. When the majority of Agents support a project, they will suggest how much funding ADIN's fund should allocate to this deal. The entire process takes about one hour, whereas analysts at VC firms typically need several days to weeks.

"The success rate of venture capital is not high," says Aaron Wright, co-founder of ADIN's parent company Tribute Labs. The current approach—making gut decisions to judge who will become tomorrow's great unicorns—has only about a 1% chance of hitting a "home run" (i.e., a project returning more than ten times the invested capital). Three-quarters of venture capital transactions don't even return the principal.

In Wright's view, AI models can significantly improve this success rate. He believes venture capital is entering its own Moneyball era, where quantitative methods will surpass human intuition, allowing everyone to hit more home runs. "These systems will increasingly weed out poor projects, focus on more successful ones, and simultaneously reduce these firms' operational costs," Wright says. He believes that within a few years, AI Agents may become the best venture capitalists in the world.

And what then? "Sand Hill Road may no longer exist."

No group is more optimistic about AI than venture capitalists. Last year they collectively invested over $200 billion in the AI sector. Advances in AI models have changed the way investors view almost every company and industry. Vinod Khosla, founder of Khosla Ventures, recently predicted that by 2030, AI will replace 80% of job responsibilities. Yet many venture capitalists seem to underestimate the extent of AI's impact on their own work.

Marc Andreessen—an acclaimed venture capitalist and co-founder of Andreessen Horowitz—has said on his podcast The Ben & Marc Show that when AI has done everything else, venture capital might be "one of the last few areas still done by humans." He believes this job is not just about writing checks but involves choosing the right ideas and the right people at the right time and then guiding them to success.

"This isn't science; it's art," Andreessen goes on to say. "If it were science, eventually someone would be able to precise tune it to get it right eight out of ten times. But the real world isn't like that. You're in the business of chance events. It has an ineffable quality, a taste factor."

Many VCs I interviewed for this article share a similar view. Keval Desai, managing partner at venture firm Shakti, likens early-stage investments to "picking a Michael Jordan out of kindergarten." A project at this stage lacks a product and revenue, only potential. "You can have all sorts of compute power and algorithms, but without data, there's nothing to analyze," Desai says. (However, he admits that when unfamiliar with a market, he sometimes lets Gemini "play the role of a VC analyst" to give advice.)

Brian Nichols, co-founder of Angel Squad—a network of angel investors associated with early-stage VC firm Hustle Fund—told me he wouldn't trust AI to do the "filtering" work in investments. Ultimately, VC is a relationship business: It's about who you know and who you can personally vouch for. At the same time, he believes AI might replace other parts of the job. While we chatted, he had just returned from a team-building event at Hustle Fund, where a partner used Claude Code to build a tool to filter founder emails. "We spend several hours a day responding to founders' pitches," he said. "That time could probably be spent elsewhere." Aydin Senkut, founder and managing partner of VC firm Felicis, told me he believes most VCs are experimenting with AI in some way to stay competitive. His firm is currently testing using chatbots to write investment memos, improve deal sourcing, and help partners "score" founders.

Projects like ADIN are trying to automate more fundamental work. The due diligence process—where investors investigate a project's feasibility, risks, and growth potential—is one of the most time-consuming aspects of venture capital, especially when considering companies in emerging markets. ADIN compresses this step to minutes, quickly identifying potential regulatory or compliance issues that could jeopardize deals. When evaluating a mining technology company, ADIN flagged a series of export control regulations and cross-border data transfer issues. "These are not questions most investors would think to ask," says Priyanka Desai, a partner at ADIN. She adds that AI "doesn't get tired, doesn't have blind spots due to inertia, and can bring to light those long-tail risks that are easily overlooked."

Humans still need to do a few things. First, ADIN's deal sourcing comes from a venture capital scout network. Although ADIN has LP funding like traditional VC funds, it provides scouts with an unusual economic incentive—scouts can receive 50% of the carried interest, which is typically reserved for GPs (general partners). "It's basically giving GP-level economic benefits to someone, allowing them to just submit deals and leverage their network," Desai says.

Humans also need to handle the "last mile," including meeting with founders and ultimately deciding whether to write a check. "We know these systems aren't perfect, so we need to double-check," Wright says. AI Agents can sometimes be overly aggressive in recommendations: he showed me a project that all Agents liked, but after meeting with the founders and discovering issues with existing competitors, ADIN decided not to invest.

On the other hand, Wright says he has used ADIN to evaluate some companies that have already raised over $20 million, many of which were unanimously viewed unfavorably by ADIN's Agents. "The challenge we face is figuring out whether this is accurate or misjudged," he says. In some instances, investors may fall into a common human trap: touting a project or founder based solely on gut feeling.

Whether AI systems can outperform investors is one thing. But there is another survival threat: the same AI technology that is making venture capital work faster and more efficiently is also making it easier and cheaper to start software companies. Over the past decade, most of the money in the VC industry has come from SaaS. But a project that once required a $2 million seed round to hire a professional engineering team can now reach the same product velocity with just a few vibe coders and less than six figures in funding. The math for big checks no longer holds.

Until recently, only a tiny fraction of unicorns were self-sustaining. According to data monitored by SaaS company SaaStr, the average software unicorn raises $370 million. Now companies like the AI image generator Midjourney have reached unicorn status with just a core team of a few dozen people. (According to the latest data from Pitchbook, Midjourney has about 100 employees. Court documents related to a copyright lawsuit indicate the company generates over $300 million in annual revenue. Midjourney did not respond to WIRED's request for comment.)

This scenario—where some founders no longer need venture funding at all—could be the one that frightens venture capitalists the most. "That's the real survival threat," says Nichols from Angel Squad. "The money is there, but the founders don't need it." Perhaps AI won't directly replace investors, but it may make the need for that investment unnecessary.

Other than robotics, biotech, or other hardware companies, there may soon be fewer startups needing the kind of large funding on which the venture capital industry is built. This could return the industry to its origins: a small, specialized field that bridges the gap between scientific breakthroughs and commercial applications. (The big companies building foundational models are still in this space; they may continue to seek VC money to pay for astronomical compute, data centers, and employee salaries.)

If starting a business becomes cheap, we may see this industry slim down rapidly. This might result in another way for investors to lose their jobs: not through replacement, but through the replacement of the business model. "If these funds are sitting idle, competing for the few transactions that genuinely need funding, that creates another problem," Nichols says. "That's what keeps investors awake at night."