👋 Hi, I’m Andre and welcome to my newsletter Data Driven VC which is all about becoming a better investor with data and AI.
ICYMI, the DDVC Landscape Report 2026 just launched! Check out how 345 VC firms are using AI and automation to become more efficient & win against their peers.
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I wrote the piece "Do You Still Need Analysts? The Investment Firm of 2030" earlier in the year, describing the trends and impact of AI on investment teams I’ve observed in our DDVC community.
Sourcing was becoming infrastructure, screening was becoming an algorithm, and the junior layer built to do both was going to shrink.
That was a thesis based on where the technology was heading.
Our new 2026 DDVC Landscape data is the first hard evidence of firms actually acting on it.
What the Hiring Data Shows
Half of DDVC firms plan to make at least one engineering hire in the next 12 months.
0% plan to cut engineering headcount.
On the investment side, the numbers flip. Only 2% of firms plan to hire a junior investor in the next 12 months.
45% plan to cut junior investor roles.
This is the first year engineering headcount plans have outpaced investment headcount plans at DDVC firms.
The budget data tells the same story from a different angle. In 2025, the average firm spent roughly two dollars on engineering HR for every dollar on data, tools, and tokens.
In 2026, that ratio is close to 1:1 across every fund size cohort, from <$100M to $1B+.
The gap didn't close because engineering spend fell. It closed because tool and token budgets grew faster than engineering hiring, which itself kept climbing.
Read together, the two charts describe the same shift: Firms are hiring the people who build the systems, and buying more of the tools and tokens that run them, at the direct expense of the junior analyst seat.
Dollars spent at investment firms are mostly fixed, the allocation is dynamic though.
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Workflow VCs Are Already Living This
Yohei Nakajima from Untapped Capital said it plainly at the DDVC Virtual Summit earlier this year. He wouldn't hire another analyst.
Untapped is what we'd call a Workflow VC, a firm built around automated pipelines and custom workflows rather than a traditional junior bench. It’s a leaner version of the Fullstack VC, a firm with dedicated engineering team building deep infrastructure and inhouse solutions for members across the firm.
The pattern across DDVC firms is consistent. Investors are shifting toward being builders themselves, and engineers are becoming a standard pillar of the org chart, not a support function bolted on the side.
The work an analyst used to do hasn't disappeared. It has moved into automated workflows and proprietary data infrastructure built in house.
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