👋 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.
Where the Analyst Work Actually Went
Deals move faster because sourcing and first-pass screening run continuously instead of on an analyst's calendar.
The operational grunt work like market mapping, comp pulls, first-draft memos, has been absorbed into the pipeline itself.
What's left for the humans in the loop is judgment and strategy, not the manual assembly of the material that judgment gets applied to.
This matches what we see across the most advanced firms in our DDVC community: The junior role that remains looks less like a traditional analyst and more like a hybrid: part operator, part data scientist, part prompt engineer, managing a system that used to take a full team.
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Is the Role Actually Dead?
Not the person. The job description as we know it, yes.
A junior hire in 2026 who spends their week manually combing databases and building comp tables from scratch is doing work the firm's own tooling should already be doing for them.
A junior hire who configures the pipeline, tunes the screening model, and runs deep-dive analysis with AI assistance is doing the job that used to take an entire team of analysts.
The hiring data backs this up directly. Firms aren't just talking about this shift anymore. 45% of them plan to cut juniors on the investment side.
Bottom Line
The thesis from earlier this year predicted a restructuring. The 2026 data shows firms already doing it.
Engineering headcount plans have overtaken investment headcount plans for the first time. Tool and token budgets have caught up to engineering HR spend within a single year.
The analyst title is fading. The work is not disappearing; it's being rebuilt around fewer, more capable people and the systems they run.
Check out the full report here for more insights like most frequently used tools, top use cases and automations across departments, and more.
Stay driven,
Andre
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