AI-Powered Startup Screening Agent for Investors

Automating Investment Screening with AI-Driven Due Diligence

Startup Screening Process

Background: The Need for Faster, Smarter Startup Screening

For Venture Capital (VC) firms, Private Equity (PE) funds, and angel investors, evaluating startups is a time-intensive process. Every day, investors receive hundreds of pitch decks, emails, and referrals. To keep up, they must:

🔹 Research founders (background, experience, credibility)

🔹 Understand the company’s market fit

🔹 Analyze financial and business model viability

🔹 Track industry trends and competitive positioning

This process requires scouring multiple sources: LinkedIn, Crunchbase, news articles, research papers, social media, and company websites. The research is fragmented, repetitive, and highly manual.

To streamline this process, one of our clients, a leading investment firm, requested an AI-powered solution that could:

✅ Automate company research across multiple data sources

✅ Allow investors to "chat" with a startup and get instant, intelligent answers

✅ Store & retrieve company insights intelligently, avoiding redundant searches

This led to the development of Velais’ AI Startup Screening Agent, a game-changing solution that accelerates pre-screening for investors.

The Challenge: Investment Research is Slow and Fragmented

🔹 Investors waste hours manually researching startups

🔹 Information is scattered across multiple sources, making it difficult to cross-validate

🔹 Key insights get lost in spreadsheets, emails, and notes

🔹 Research often repeats unnecessarily, as analysts and partners look up the same information multiple times

These inefficiencies slow down deal flow and increase decision-making time, leading to missed opportunities and reduced efficiency.

We set out to build an AI Agent that acts as an investor’s personal research assistant, helping them get quick, insightful answers and screen startups faster and smarter.

The Solution: AI-Driven Startup Screening for Smarter Investment Decisions

Our AI Startup Screening Agent was designed to automate, centralize, and enhance the due diligence process. Here’s how it works:

1️⃣ Intelligent Information Gathering

The AI Agent searches multiple data sources, collecting and summarizing key information about startups:

✔ LinkedIn API: Pulls data on founders, team size, funding rounds, and professional backgrounds

✔ Company Websites & Blogs: Crawls official websites to understand business models and services

✔ Social Media (Twitter, Reddit, LinkedIn Posts): Analyzes public sentiment and traction

✔ Research Papers & News Articles: Extracts industry insights, patents, and deep tech details

✔ Financial Data & Market Trends: Aggregates revenue insights (from a client's proprietary dataset), competitor comparisons, and market growth projections

2️⃣ Interactive AI Chat for Pre-Screening

Once the information is gathered, the agent allows investors to converse naturally with it, just like they would with a research analyst.

🔹 "Give me an overview of the founder's background."

🔹 "What is this company’s business model? Explain it simply."

🔹 "Is this market growing? What are the main competitors?"

🔹 "What recent funding rounds has the company raised?"

🔹 "Summarize the company's financial data for me."

This natural language interaction lets investors instantly access key insights, removing the need to manually sift through endless documents.

3️⃣ Smart Data Storage & Retrieval with AI-Optimized Memory

The agent is backed by Langchain, Vertex AI Gemini 2.0, and Sonar API, making it intelligent and efficient.

• Embeddings & Vector Storage: The AI remembers past searches and avoids retrieving the same information twice

• Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG): Ensures real-time, context-aware answers

• Search Optimization: Investors can access all previously gathered data on a company without starting from scratch

The Results: Faster Investment Decisions, Less Time Wasted

💡 Before Velais: Investors spent 6-8 hours per startup gathering and analyzing data

💡 After Velais: Investors can pre-screen a startup in just 15-30 minutes

🚀 Key Outcomes:

✅ 75% reduction in research time per startup

✅ 2X faster deal flow pipeline, allowing more startups to be evaluated

✅ 40% increase in relevant deal discoveries, as AI surfaces insights that might have been missed manually

✅ 70% fewer repetitive research tasks, freeing analysts to focus on deeper due diligence

✅ Higher confidence in decision-making, as investors access more complete and reliable information

With this AI-driven solution, investors spend less time on repetitive research and more time making strategic investment decisions.

Why This Case Matters

This case study demonstrates how AI can revolutionize venture capital and investment research by making startup screening smarter, faster, and more efficient.

🚀 For investment firms, this means:

✅ Faster pre-screening & due diligence to reduce research time per startup

✅ Higher-quality investment decisions with more complete, real-time insights

✅ More deals evaluated in less time, speeding up the deal flow pipeline

✅ Less repetitive work enables analysts focus on strategy, not data collection

This approach isn’t just a time-saver, it’s a competitive advantage.