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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.
I'm Rosie Bradbury, and this is The Weekend Pitch. You can reach me at rosie.bradbury@pitchbook.com or on LinkedIn.
“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. |
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| The strategic impact of the new LP-GP relationship |
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The demand for near real-time visibility, customizable reporting, and faster closes is at an all-time high. Meanwhile, GPs are navigating equally high complexities across funds, asset classes, and service providers. But as many firms move towards data consolidation, this change has also impacted the LP-GP relationship.
What do these major shifts mean for firms? Get the latest insights in this Ebook from the financial data platform experts at Arcesium.
Read the Ebook. |
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PE activity in the US and Canadian healthcare services market fell 16% year-over-year, according to our latest Healthcare Services Report. However, a bright spot remains in in-home care and elder care.
By count, where do home-based care companies rank among other segments of PE-backed healthcare services companies?
A) Second-highest
B) Third-highest
C) Fourth-highest
D) Fifth-highest
Find your answer at the bottom of The Weekend Pitch! |
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A selection from our most-read articles of the past few days.
- Nasdaq's new 'fast entry' rule could scramble the exit calculus for SpaceX's earliest backers by compressing the window between IPO and index inclusion and potentially driving price volatility before lock-ups even expire. Read more
- What does ‘strong performance’ look like for a mid-market buyout firm? LPs want to see more realizations before committing to a new fund, even if the market still has room for a well-told story. Find out more
- An insurtech startup for non-human companions is banking on the swift adoption of humanoid robots and on being the first to exploit uncharted legal territory. Read on
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| (Vernon Yuen/NurPhoto via Getty Images) |
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“People aren’t going to just go to their Apple store and want a brain chip. You have to really think about that from a tech to commercialization risk timeline. Commercialization in the short term looks like the world’s best-in-class healthcare organizations.”
—Abdo John Hajj, managing partner at Type One Ventures, who has invested in several brain-computer interface startups including Neuralink. Despite VC buzz for brain implants, user acquisition and commercialization remains an unclear piece of the puzzle. Read more about brain-computer interface startups here. |
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Answer: B
Home-based care companies account for the third-highest number of PE-backed healthcare services companies, behind dental and mental health businesses. The biggest deals of Q1 were mostly all in home health and elder care, indicating investor confidence in the subsegment. Read more about the state of the healthcare services sector here. |
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This edition of The Weekend Pitch was written by Rosie Bradbury and Nadine Manske. It was edited by Kia Kokalitcheva and Nadine Manske.
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