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August's Highlights Across Startups, VC, Data & AI
👋 Hi, I’m Andre and welcome to my newsletter Data-Driven VC which is all about becoming a better investor with Data & AI. Join 34,960 thought leaders from VCs like a16z, Accel, Index, Sequoia, and more to understand how startup investing becomes more data-driven, why it matters, and what it means for you.
Brought to you by Affinity - Campfire 2025 is coming to London!
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Join peers for an afternoon of networking and hands-on learning. From smarter sourcing and fundraising to practical AI integration, you’ll take home proven tactics, hands-on demos, and real-world success stories you can deploy immediately.
Welcome to our monthly wrap-up episode where we cover August’s most relevant content at the intersection of startups, VC, data & AI👇
MULTIPLES SNAPSHOT📸
Welcome back after your summer break! Hopefully you recovered well and recharged batteries for an exciting H2-2025.
Despite everyone talking about a “summer hole”, specifically in Europe where OOO messages seem the norm across August, my summer was actually surprisingly busy with 2 new term sheets issued and several follow-on rounds closing. The most ambitious founders don’t sleep!
Also the public markets didn’t pause. Here’s the quick August snapshot. Full episode with all tables and deep dives here.
INTERESTING RESEARCH & REPORTS📈
ARR Milestones for Series A Keep Rising
SVB’s latest State of the Markets report shows that ARR milestones for Series A doubled in the last four years. Here’s the key insights:
Top tier Series A: While the top quartile raises Series A at $7M ARR, the top decile has grown past $10M ARR already.
Median ARR nearly doubled: From $1.3M in 2021 to almost $3M in 2024 for US B2B software startups.
Low-quartile companies squeezed out: ARR values have increased more quickly at the lower quartile than the upper quartile, indicating that teams with mediocre traction do not make the cut anymore.
✈️ KEY TAKEAWAYS
ARR milestones keep increasing across stages. For Series A, they have roughly doubled in the last four years, making $3M the new $1M bar for the median company.
AI Founder Profiles Defy Stereotypes
Maggie Basta’s analysis of the past three years of AI unicorn founders shows no single demographic or credential reliably predicts success. While some trends exist—such as a concentration of MIT alumni and roughly one in four holding a technical PhD—the long tail of variation dominates.
Age and Geography: Founder ages at company inception range widely, with notable clusters in the late 20s to mid-30s but also representation from early 20s to late 40s. Over half were born outside the US, spanning regions from India to Sweden to Chile.
Education: Undergraduate backgrounds are diverse, with most founders coming from outside “top 10” schools. While MIT appears most often, the majority of institutions are represented only once.
Investor Origins: First lead investors vary significantly, from top-tier Silicon Valley firms to niche and international funds, with no dominant backer profile.
✈️ KEY TAKEAWAYS
Recent AI unicorn founders share few easily measurable traits, reinforcing that AI success remains an n-of-1 game. Surface-level pattern matching offers limited predictive value compared to deeper, case-by-case evaluation.
INSPIRING TECH IN VC CONTENT💡
How the Best Venture Capitalists are Using AI
Andrew Chan highlights how leading VCs now treat AI as a “deal scout,” augmenting—not replacing—the human judgment at the core of investing. Firms use custom platforms and models like ChatGPT and Gemini to scan thousands of startups, parse pitch decks, and surface patterns or anomalies—work that once took analysts weeks now happens in hours.
They pair these AI systems with dashboards, scoring tools, and in-house datasets that flag promising companies or hidden risks early. Instead of replacing conversations with founders, AI frees partners to spend more time on judgment and relationships, while repetitive data crunching is automated. By training and refining these systems today, firms like EQT and Sierra Ventures are betting on compounding advantages—building a “venture factory” that scales precision without losing the human touch.
Top 10 AI Tools Used by a16z Partner Olivia Moore
Why 80% of VCs Still Operate Like It’s 1999
Fabian Mella Lukacs, founder of NeoVC, says that VC’s next transformation will be its own. Despite VC’s outsized impact—backing nearly half of all U.S. public companies before IPO—inefficiency is systemic. Early-stage funds waste thousands of hours each year on manual deal ops, costing the industry billions in lost productivity.
The pain is felt on both sides. Startups endure slow diligence, fragmented communications, and repetitive reporting. Investors juggle scattered CRMs, poor portfolio visibility, and LP reporting bottlenecks—stretching lean teams thin and limiting scalability.
NeoVC’s answer is an “all-in-one VC as a service” platform that unifies fund management, startup dashboards, LP reporting, and predictive analytics into one secure system. By blending automation, AI, and standardized workflows, it delivers clarity for LPs, focus for founders, and scalability for GPs. Just as fintech transformed public markets, this model could mark VC’s long-overdue transformation of itself.
USV Believes in Augmented VC as the Future
USV recently posted their prediction about the future of VC as AI-augmented investing, where tools amplify human judgment rather than replace it. They believe the next generation of VC firms will be defined by how effectively they embed AI into their workflows—making learning faster, sourcing earlier, and operations sharper.
Just as they’ve backed transformative companies like Coinbase and Duolingo, USV is now rethinking its own operating model for the AI era, betting that those who experiment and build early will gain compounding advantages.
Experiences From Building a Data Driven VC in an Emerging Market
Danny Chepenko, VC, data & GTM expert and Editor-in-Chief at nonamevc, shares how his team builds data-driven VC across 12+ emerging markets by treating their operations like a “remote syndicate scout.” Lacking physical presence, they rely on Specter—a unified data platform—for end-to-end investment discovery, enabling them to source, score, and track founders across borders efficiently.
They pull real-time signals—page views, retention, headcount, alumni movement—from multiple touchpoints into a central warehouse, blending raw data with proprietary context for smarter monitoring. This “satellite scouting” replaces boots on the ground and turns dispersed signals into actionable leads.
But Danny stresses it’s not just about the model: being embedded with deal teams keeps feedback loops tight and the system evolving. He points out that the goal isn’t always the next unicorn, but building cumulative market knowledge— spotting plateaued yet promising companies, tracking talent flows, and staying deeply connected to ecosystems through structured data.
By blending AI-backed infrastructure, human insight, and emergent patterns across frontier markets, they’ve built a venture “network in the cloud” that turns global reach into local relevance.
EVENTS📆
Only 4 Weeks Left Until Our DDVC Investor Summit 2025
Haven’t booked your ticket to Munich yet? Peak time! It’s less than a month until we co-host our physical Investor Summit 2025 again with our friends at Bit & Pretzels on 29th September 2025 in Munich🔥🥨🍻
We aim to make this the premier event for 1,500+ GPs and 300+ LPs to meet in Europe, alongside Bits & Pretzels festival and the one and only Oktoberfest.
After months of prep, I’m super excited about our world class speakers from VC firms like Accel, Balderton, Creandum, EQT, IVP, Khosla, KKR, Lightspeed, etc. and top tier LPs like BVK, Isomer Capital, MEAG, Willgrow, and more! We’ll have two dedicated tracks for GPs and for LPs. So prepare for deep content and unique insights!
Tickets are selling out fast and we’ll soon reach capacity, so make sure to get yours now and join us in Munich 29th September!
Data Driven VC Community Get-Together in Munich
Join our exclusive DDVC community breakfast 30th September in Munich that we co-host together with our friends at HSBC Innovation Banking - just one day after our Investor Summit at Bits & Pretzels. Spots are limited, so make sure to sign up early.
“TECH IN VC” JOBS👩💻
If you’re recruiting tech in VC jobs, just hit reply with the URL to your job posting and we’ll include it in our next monthly wrap-up episode + share via VCSTACK.COM
Open positions:
Tech Lead @All Iron Ventures in Bilbao here
Analytics Engineer @Dawn Capital in London here
Data Engineer @Dawn Capital in London here
Fullstack Software Eng @Equation Cap in Munich here
Senior Data Engineer @Growth Equity Firm in the Bay Area here
Principal Software Engineer @SignalFire in SF here
AI Lead @USV in NYC here
THIS MONTH’S DATA DRIVEN VC EPISODES⏮️
Essays
Insights (from the data)
Resources
Stay driven,
Andre
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