The Week in Investor AI · Issue 2 · Oct 16, 2026

Agents take the first pass

A partner-only VC uses a per-partner score to shortlist which startups it meets, Korea's pension fund cuts an eight-hour research task to ten minutes, and fund admins hand agents the first run through the checklist.

Reporting window: the week ending Oct 16, 2026. Older background items carry their own dates in the citations.

One pattern ran through almost everything we logged this week: the agent does the first pass, and a named human makes the call. Mosaic Ventures, a partner-led VC firm with no associates or analysts, re-scores tens of thousands of startups every two weeks and runs an AI screen before anything reaches a partner. Inception42's new Alpha flags diligence gaps for PE and sovereign deal teams and drafts an IC memo where every claim links to its source. Caruso's fund-admin agents tick off whatever the data confirms and leave the judgment calls to staff, with a separate reviewer signing off.

Allocators are doing it too. Korea's National Pension Service says a four-month pilot with AWS cut a central-bank policy research task from about eight hours to about ten minutes, using only public data. The most useful part of Mosaic's write-up is the honest bit: the system was the main catalyst for about 15-20% of its first meetings last year, and its experiment matching thesis writing to company descriptions was 'wrong more often than it is right.'

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