Yohei Nakajima isn’t simply investing in AI startups — he’s a hardcore person and early adopter of the transformative know-how.
Nakajima, the Seattle-area enterprise capitalist at Untapped Capital, began experimenting with generative AI instruments in 2022 — earlier than ChatGPT grew to become mainstream.
Lately he and his colleagues are utilizing AI instruments for almost every little thing: sourcing and assessing offers, knowledge entry, advertising and marketing, and extra.
Maybe most unusual is the best way Nakajima builds and exams his personal AI-powered concepts in public. For instance, he vibe-coded a startup intelligence platform earlier this 12 months — VCpedia — and went viral for Child AGI, a well-liked open supply autonomous agent challenge he launched in 2023.
Untapped has additionally rolled out customized GPTs, together with “Imply VC,” which helps startups refine their pitches and concepts. “Founders love utilizing it,” Nakajima stated.
Constructing in public has not solely helped Nakajima get entry to developer communities and determine traits — “we’re handled like builders ourselves,” he stated — but additionally acts as a priceless technique for Untapped.
“It’s each R&D and advertising and marketing and relationship-building all tied into one,” he stated. “And it permits us to have a robust pulse on how AI is used. Once we share how we use AI, we get a variety of suggestions from others on their experiences.”
It’s additionally led to investments. Untapped was constructing due diligence instruments with AI and bought launched to Wokelo, a Seattle-based startup that was growing the same product. Untapped invested in Wokelo’s pre-seed spherical in 2023.
For different companies or corporations seeking to combine AI into their very own workflows, Nakajima encourages execs to steer by instance.
When he began getting questions from his colleagues that ChatGPT might reply, he’d begin a thread with the bot after which share it with the crew.
“By seeing me use ChatGPT commonly, and seeing the good thing about it, my crew began to select it up,” he stated.
Nakajima, who grew up within the Seattle space and beforehand labored at Scrum Ventures and Techstars, is betting that corporations will more and more use AI to get work performed.
“We’ll proceed to see deep integrations of AI into human workflows, to some extent the place we’ll see AI doing extra work than people,” he stated, referencing output measured by AI contribution vs. human output.
Nakajima stated he’s fascinated about traits round brokers and authorization; AI governance at bigger corporations, and shopper apps in industries akin to movie, gaming, or music which are native to generative AI.
Untapped describes itself as a pre-seed generalist investor targeted on U.S. startups. It raised $9.5 million for its first fund and made 36 investments. Its common test dimension is between $250,000 and $500,000 into corporations elevating at valuations of $10 million or decrease.
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