The Missing Daily Venture Platform
Alex Johnson, co-founder & CEO of Velvet, on vertical AI for venture capital
The hard part is not building another venture workflow tool, it is becoming the place where both sides of the capital stack already live before a deal or liquidity event starts. In venture today, GPs work across decks, email, CRM, spreadsheets, and market data, while LPs usually only drop in for fundraising, reporting, or a specific transaction. That is why private markets still lack the Bloomberg like daily habit that makes matching, diligence, and liquidity feel native instead of bolted on.
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Most existing software is single sided. Juniper Square gives LPs a strong portal for onboarding, reporting, documents, and account updates, but it is centered on GP investor relations, not the day to day deal evaluation workflow where venture teams spend time deciding what to back.
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AngelList came closer to connecting LPs and GPs by making syndicates and rolling funds discoverable to its investor network, but its core habit formed around fundraising vehicles and retail style access, not a shared daily research and decision environment for institutional LPs and GPs.
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The strategic prize is large because first party workflow data compounds. Aumni became valuable enough for JPMorgan to acquire because document level investment data sits upstream of allocation, monitoring, and liquidity. A tool that captures both GP decisions and LP behavior every day would own an even richer map of private capital flow.
This is heading toward platforms that start as daily decision software and then expand into capital movement. The winners in private markets will not be the marketplaces that appear only when someone wants to buy or sell, but the systems that already contain the memo, the diligence trail, the investor context, and the relationships before money moves.