Hustle Fund is a pre-seed fund with 680 portfolio companies, among them Webflow, Boom Supersonic, and Gamma, and over a thousand more coming through inbound every month.
Haley Bryant, a former startup operator and COO of Animalz, is now a partner there, investing across everything from fintech to space. “A lot of it is trying to get deep enough to earn the right to have an opinion," she says. Sacra runs inside the workflow she already uses, through Sacra MCP in Claude and in Slack.
We talked to Haley about how that works.
Inside Hustle Fund's deal pipeline
When someone sends Haley a deal, the first stop is Sacra. “I'll have Sacra take a quick look,” she says. Here, Haley is looking for the answers to a few key questions:
- How many companies in this space have already raised?
- How quickly is the market growing?
- What has worked here from a business model perspective?
Once a deal survives the first pass, Sacra helps Haley prep for the call. “Today alone, I'm going to talk about autonomous robots, trucking, and then jump back up to the agentic infrastructure layer,” says Haley. Each of those calls gets the same prep: a Sacra rundown of the company, the market, and who else is in it.
After the call comes the memo. Haley pulls her Granola notes and her primary expert research, has Sacra digest it all through Hustle Fund's evaluation framework into a first draft, and dictates her own read on top with Whisper.
Sacra runs in Hustle Fund's Slack investment research channel, so deal research happens where the whole team can see it. "I can push it back into Slack, which enhances the hive mind," says Haley. Teammates chime in when they've already looked at a space and passed.
It carries past the check, too. With 680 portfolio companies, positioning drifts quickly. "Sacra can help really kick the tires on positioning," says Haley, as founders prep decks for their next raise and work out which companies investors will already have in mind.
Why AI research breaks for private company numbers
General-purpose AI gets Haley part of the way. “You might get good information from deep research, directionally, on a market. Growing, shrinking, the headwinds, tailwinds,” she says. “But the numbers were really hard to trust.” Revenue figures, recent valuations, and detailed reporting on competitors takes real manual time to pin down, when they can be found at all.
For Hustle Fund, the cost of getting that wrong is time. “If we spend a lot of time on spaces that are not actually unique, or that are not actually growing that quickly, there's a huge opportunity cost,” says Haley. “Ultimately we're stewards of capital for our LPs.”
The fund writes small checks and runs without an enterprise data budget. “To have a place where I can get trusted valuation information if I want to do comps, or to see competitive research, that's been really helpful,” she says. “That saves me time, my most finite resource. Sometimes it's, okay, this is a cool idea, but actually there are five other startups with a very similar go-to-market, so I'm not going to spend time on this.”
The trust goes back further than her time at Hustle Fund. Haley has been angel investing since 2020 and credits Sacra with part of her education as an investor. “Sacra has really been a place where I've learned a lot about how to think deeply about a company, the trajectory of a company, the quality of the team, and the opportunity in the market,” she says. “That's part of why it's become a trusted part of my stack.”
Four months to a check on a deep tech company
Last December, Haley met a team in stealth, building deep tech infrastructure in a category she hadn't evaluated before. "It was such an interesting idea, but I had no idea how to think about it, or who even to talk to," she says.
Sacra was how she got up to speed. "What Sacra helped me do was understand what questions to ask, what other opportunities have existed in the space but with different business models, and what's different now from a timing perspective about why this could work today," she says. That spanned the commercial side and the core technical risks, including the work being done in adjacent markets to solve them.
It became the most calls Haley has ever had with a single company, and four months later, an investment. The company is still in stealth. "That was really where I started seeing the value of having another data resource beyond some of the basic LLMs," she says.
The same pattern now runs across her pipeline. "What Sacra helps me do is compress the amount of time it takes to go back and forth with founders and get a lot more proof of work before writing a check," says Haley. Her turnaround to founders is the same week it always was. What's changed is how much fits into it. "I'm more prepped for the first call, so I'm able to ask better questions, which leads to better follow-up questions." And, she says, a much better sense of how a founder thinks, because the conversations go deeper, faster.
Get started with Sacra MCP
Everything in Haley's workflow runs on Sacra MCP, available to every Sacra user. You can connect it to Claude or ChatGPT in a few minutes, or install it in Slack the way Hustle Fund has. Full documentation is at docs.sacra.com.
If you're working Sacra into your own investment process and want to talk about your use case, email us at founders@sacra.com.