Ensemble VC launches comprehensive AI tool to derisk venture capital investments, with partners ranging from Sand Hill Road VCs to Silicon Valley’s top lawyers
- Austin, Texas-based Ensemble VC data scientists developed and are now deploying “Unity,” the “copilot for venture capitalists,” which ranks portfolio company teams based on hundreds of objective data points
- VC firms including Draper Associates, Boost and Overmatch are the first to use the tool, which can be trained on specific niches – from SaaS and AI to defense tech, fusion and space exploration
- Silicon Valley’s preeminent law firm, Wilson Sonsini, is using Unity to assess which startup clients to pursue
To get in touch with Ensemble VC, send us a message at ir@ensemble.vc.
Austin, Texas (June 11, 2025) – Ensemble VC has developed and deployed a comprehensive system to derisk venture capital investments, with partners ranging from Sand Hill Road VCs to Silicon Valley’s most respected law firm.
Read the press release on BusinessWire.
Ensemble co-founder and data scientist Gopi Sundaramurthy spent five years developing “Unity,” which ranks prospective portfolio company teams based on hundreds of objective data points.
Unity then ranks teams – including teams with first-time founders – according to their likelihood of commercial success. Unity can then also help portfolio companies build teams with people most likely to excel in their roles, whether in biomanufacturing, machine learning engineering, downstream processing, go-to-market strategy, marketing and communication, HR or other functions.
“Leading venture capitalists are betting their limited partners’ money on AI entrepreneurs. But the VC industry, for the most part, hasn’t used AI itself to improve performance across all three major functions of its own industry – sourcing, selecting and servicing portfolio companies,” said Dr. Gopi Sundaramurthy, co-founder of Ensemble VC, former Head of Data Science at the Kauffman Fellows VC Fund, and the first data scientist at IBM Watson Health. “We decided to tackle the trifecta.”
VC firms Draper Associates, Boost, Overmatch and others are already collaborating with Ensemble to use the tool, which can be trained on specific investment niches – from SaaS to military tech, fusion and space exploration. And Silicon Valley’s preeminent law firm, Wilson Sonsini, is also using Unity to assess which startup clients to pursue.
Derisking VC
Unity scrapes millions of points on the Internet – from yesterday’s X posts and SEC filings to alma maters, obscure details on LinkedIn, and stock performance on secondary markets – to assess founders, team members and anyone else on an early-stage team.
Ensemble’s system instantly generates navigable market maps, tracking deep networks of investors, employees, and founders as they move across industries. Unity searches dynamically — by investor, company, geography, and sector — ensuring that the firm doesn’t miss entrepreneurs or their seed-stage, high-performing startups simply because they don’t yet fit pre-existing patterns.
Unity also tracks where talent is moving. The data platform provides a real-time view of technical talent flow, anticipating industry shifts before they materialize. This combination of direct technical experience and proprietary data insights gives Unity users an unmatched ability to spot and back the best companies before the market catches up.
Entrepreneurs can also apply Unity to internal functions, such as business development. Unity’s customer introduction program, GTM 2.0, automatically identifies and surfaces potential customers in a highly targeted manner. By analyzing factors such as team composition, technology stack, and competitive landscape, Unity generates precise introductions both within and beyond any individual’s or team’s network. This system has played a critical role in helping companies secure enterprise customers and accelerate their growth.
Ensemble has developed a practical solution for collecting the vast but fragmented “dust” left by online data points, transforming scattered signals into holistic company profiles. Unity doesn’t claim to ‘pick unicorns’—it simply equips the investor with a wealth of information that is otherwise crucially unavailable. Whether a startup has been publicly vocal or deliberately under the radar, Unity users enter every meeting with a full, data-backed report on its history, team, traction, and market position. This level of intelligence allows Ensemble to operate with an unprecedented level of precision, making decisions faster, seeing market shifts earlier, and functioning as super VCs in a landscape where access to information is a competitive edge.
Objective data instead of “vibe checks”
The modern venture capital industry began in 1946. That’s when Harvard University Prof. Georges Doriot – “the father of venture capital” – formed the first institutional private equity investment firm, American Research and Development Corporation.
In 1959, William Henry Draper Jr. formed the first West Coast venture capital firm – and the industry blossomed amid the San Francisco Bay Area’s emerging ecosystem of state and public universities, national labs, and counterculture ethos, with more people more interested in starting their own thing than joining hierarchic multinationals. Draper and later 20th century VCs quickly learned that, to get the best deals, they needed to build and rely on homegrown networks of local entrepreneurs. Engineers, scientists and businesspeople who came through Stanford, Hewlett-Packard and Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory became investable assets.
As the tech industry boomed in the last decade of the 20th century, VCs began scouring Apple, Google and the “PayPal mafia” as sources of talent. But their network-driven approach fundamentally stayed the same, even as entrepreneurship began to flourish in India, UAE, Estonia and beyond.
Venture capital remains the highest risk segment of investing. At least 75% of venture-backed startups fail. By using agentic AI to source, select and service startup teams, Ensemble gives its portfolio companies an unfair advantage – a “network” that consists of the entire universe of entrepreneurs – and other VCs are converging on the approach.
“No matter how vast your network, human constraints always limited your network and thus your deal flow and potential,” said Tim Draper, the third-generation VC and founder of Draper Associates (formerly DFJ), Draper University, and the hit TV show, Meet The Drapers. His investments include Baidu, Hotmail, Tesla, SpaceX, AngelList, SolarCity, Ring, Twitter, DocuSign, Coinbase and Robinhood. “Unity helps eliminate the human constraints.”
“VCs like to say they invest in cutting-edge tech, but the dirty secret is that the majority of firms are running on Excel sheets and reliant on handshakes, vibe checks and physical networks close to Sand Hill Road. That doesn’t scale in a global ecosystem of entrepreneurs,” said Collin West, Ensemble VC co-founder and Managing Partner. “Instead of endless ‘coffee chats’ wasting founder time, we can spend time helping our portcos build excellent teams and find customers. This is how we can increase the slope of innovation at scale.”
The ensemble behind Ensemble
Sundaramurthy and West co-founded Ensemble in 2020 alongside co-founder Managing Partner Conrad Shang, who has invested in seven unicorns, including three IPOs.
Ensemble’s team built an inaugural pilot fund that made 12 investments as a proof point for the firm’s ability to turn data insights into real-world wins. Five of those companies went on to become generational powers in their respective fields: Zoom Video, Groww (“Robinhood of India”), Carta, Sidecar Health, and ICON.
The hit rate for the Ensemble team’s first fund proved that the data was providing a repeatable real-world advantage. That vehicle has very good returns, driven by Zoom’s IPO amid the COVID crisis. Groww’s success in the fund has also made the fund a very successful vehicle for investors.
Ensemble’s Fund II is early, but already boasts several early unicorns.
Ensemble’s portfolio reflects an investment process designed to identify top companies before traditional VCs even know where to look—whether by geography, talent movement, or business model. Within emerging technology markets, Ensemble quickly identifies the underserved layers of the tech stack.
In mental healthcare, Ensemble targeted the practitioner-enablement layer with Blueprint AI, which enhances provider efficiency rather than attempting to replace human judgment. In AI and SaaS, rather than investing in the crowded application layer, Ensemble backed Loti, which secures and scales AI infrastructure. In defense technology, the firm recognized that the future was not in hardware alone but in superteam startups manufacturing at speed and scale—Saronic in naval autonomy and CHAOS Industries in next-generation radar. In enterprise software, Ensemble identified a shift as top talent left big tech to build smarter solutions, exemplified by Manifest, founded by ex-Palantir engineers to redefine AI-driven workflows. Across sectors, Ensemble’s edge lies in recognizing where the best people are moving—and backing them before the market catches on.
Since that first fund, Ensemble’s platform has evolved from merely identifying exceptional startup teams to invest in to also winning the right to back them—at scale. Rather than pursuing founders by offering a fully staffed portfolio services team, Ensemble has built proprietary software products that help founders accelerate growth from day one – and often before an investment is even made.
By leveraging technology and speaking the founder’s language as a technical team—data, product, and peer-to-peer insight—Ensemble has created a system that resonates deeply with technical, product-driven teams. This platform not only improves operational efficiency but also meaningfully expands the firm’s capacity to support its portfolio, creating compounding advantages over time.
Ensemble VC reflects the scrappy ethos it looks for in its portfolio companies. Half of Ensemble’s team are data scientists and engineers. The office is in low-cost Texas instead of Silicon Valley.
Ensemble’s LPs include university endowments, foundations, some of the nation’s top family offices, and a strong network of operators and venture investors. Founding partners come out of Kauffman Fellows, Bain Capital Ventures, Norwest, Correlation Ventures, and IBM Watson.
“Over a decade ago, building a data-driven VC strategy was a wild idea. We were literally laughed out of rooms,” said Shang, who worked at Yammer through its $1 billion acquisition by Microsoft and previously worked as an investor at Bain Capital Ventures. “We’re confident that the industry will rapidly convert to our approach.”
About Ensemble VC
Ensemble VC is an early-stage investor based in Austin, TX. The firm takes a product-centric approach to investing, leveraging the firm’s comprehensive data platform to intelligently and scalably support founders. Ensemble invests early in highly technical emerging technologies that span from AI to defense technology. For more information about Ensemble, please visit www.ensemble.vc
Media contact
media@ensemble.vc
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