Is VC an art form or could a robot do it?
Josie Doan/PitchBook News
Daisy is a principal at Patron, a $200 million consumer VC firm in New York. She joined after stints at Universal Music and Andreessen Horowitz, has a Bachelor’s from the Wharton School of Business, and was born in Switzerland.
Oh, and she’s an AI agent.
As agentic AI technology becomes more sophisticated and tools like OpenClaw spark even wider interest, more and more VC firms are integrating AI agents into their daily workflows. But they’re not just tasked with rote automations like scheduling emails or sending reminders.
Instead, some VCs are assigning their agents an array of responsibilities that have traditionally been the work of young analysts. Not to mention, these agents also have surprisingly unique and specific “personalities” and “experiences,” taking the idea of using AI in the place of human headcount to a new level.
“We thought a lot about: What type of person would we want to hire? What would be most impactful to us today, short of hiring a fourth partner?” said Jason Yeh, co-founder of Patron Fund and Daisy’s “boss.” Yeh’s partner, Amber Atherton, created her own complementary AI agent, Eli.
For Yeh, who attended the Huntsman Program at the University of Pennsylvania and spent time in Asia and Europe while at Riot Games, it was important that Daisy reflect his own background and the firm’s multicultural worldview. “It’s a fine line because we don’t want her to just be a digital representation of us,” said Yeh. “It was more like having some kind of shared background to make her more likely to be somebody that we would interact with regularly.”
Not all of Patron’s agents can be replicas of Daisy. In fact, ensuring that individual agents have distinct backgrounds and pull from different sources of information is proving critical. “[A] kink we’ve been working through is, how do you have them not just collapse into groupthink?” said Pamela Vagata, co-founder at early-stage venture firm Pebblebed.
Pebblebed’s collection of AI agents, which operate as a sort of standalone consultancy, communicate constantly with one another on a Slack-style app, over email, and even host their own daily stand-up.
One of Pebblebed’s agents, Aura Farmer, is terminally online — constantly scanning social media to surface new information to the firm. Aura Farmer is originally from Arkansas and is a former tennis champion. Another Pebblebed agent, Diligence Baby, has an MBA from Stanford’s Graduate School of Business and takes a first crack at vetting each startup, starting from its pitch deck. The list goes on, but each agent has their own distinct “swim lane,” knowledge depositories and memory.
