AI in Venture Capital with Andre Retterath
Dr. Andre Retterath
General Partner, Earlybird Venture Capital | Author, Data Driven VC
About This Event
Dr. Andre Retterath, General Partner at Earlybird Venture Capital and author of the Data Driven VC newsletter, joined GenAI Wednesday Munich to explain how AI is changing venture capital. The session focused on Earlybird's EagleEye platform — referred to in the talk as "Eagle Eye" — and how it powers data-driven startup sourcing, AI-assisted screening, due diligence, and the role of human judgment in investment decisions.
Why it matters: venture capital is one of the last major financial industries still run largely on manual workflows. Retterath's data-driven approach is an early, concrete blueprint for how AI reshapes an entire profession — what to automate, what to keep human, and where a durable edge actually comes from.
📝 Talk Recap
Earlybird partner André Retterath — an engineer by training who did his PhD on data-driven venture capital between TU Munich and Cambridge — walked a packed jambit MeetHub through how AI is reshaping his own industry. His thesis: VC is "at day zero" of digitization (in 70 years the only upgrade was from pen-and-paper to Word and Excel), and the firms that build a real data advantage now will pull away from everyone else. He set the scene with the "AI triangle" of algorithms, data and compute and a four-layer market map (infrastructure → intelligence foundation → tooling → applications), then spent the back half on EagleEye, the sourcing-and-screening engine he built inside Earlybird.
Key points:
- The 2022 breakthrough was distribution, not invention. Transformers existed since 2017 — ChatGPT's leap was the chat interface, which finally put the models in everyone's hands.
- Three predictions. Large language models converge in performance (open source being the main driver); AI accelerates the discovery of new materials, drugs and physics (e.g. portfolio company Marvel Fusion); and the cost of experimentation collapses — the fuel behind Sam Altman's "one-person billion-dollar company" and a broader concentration of value.
- The future of work shifts. Agents will replace the average worker before the 10x one — raising hard questions about value concentration (Nvidia, Microsoft) and how society redistributes it (a three-day work week?).
- VC is a finding-and-picking game. Roughly two-thirds of value is created in sourcing and screening, and because returns follow a power law, the goal is to minimize false negatives — never miss the next outlier.
- EagleEye in practice. Fuse secondary data (Crunchbase, PitchBook, CB Insights), 500+ legally-scraped primary sources (LinkedIn, GitHub, Product Hunt, Reddit) and Earlybird's 27-year relationship graph (Affinity) into a data lake; entity-match it into a single source of truth; snapshot it daily; then score with deterministic (bias-codified) and statistical (XGBoost) models. It tracks 8M+ companies and 11M+ people and narrows ~50,000 fundable European concepts a year down to the ~1,500 first meetings humans can actually take.
- Augmented, not autonomous. Benchmarked against 114 investment professionals, the screening model hit ~80% accuracy — as good as the best human — but Earlybird still puts a partner on every board. AI builds the funnel; humans make the call.
- A more inclusive VC. Scoring "distance traveled" over pedigree lets the firm proactively find founders outside the usual hubs and networks.
Key Takeaways
- 🚀 The VC industry is at "day zero" of digitization — massive AI opportunity ahead
- 🦅 How EagleEye processes 50,000+ fundable concepts per year across Europe
- 📊 AI use cases in forecasting startup success, analyzing market dynamics, and enhancing due diligence
- 🧭 Strategic guidance on navigating the VC landscape with AI
💬 In His Words
"Back then and still today, the venture capital industry is really at day zero when it comes to digitization."
— Dr. Andre Retterath
"For us it's not about the true positives — it's really about decreasing the false negatives."
— Dr. Andre Retterath
"It's easy to look at your credentials… What's more difficult is to look at the distance traveled."
— Dr. Andre Retterath
Highlights Video
🔗 Resources & Tools
Frequently Asked Questions
What is Earlybird's EagleEye platform?
EagleEye is Earlybird Venture Capital's data-driven sourcing and screening platform, built by partner Andre Retterath. It fuses commercial databases, 500+ primary web sources and Earlybird's own 27-year relationship graph to track millions of companies and founders, then scores and ranks them — narrowing roughly 50,000 fundable European concepts a year down to the ~1,500 first meetings the team can actually take. It was referred to in the talk as "Eagle Eye."
Who is Dr. Andre Retterath?
Andre Retterath is a General Partner at Earlybird Venture Capital and the author of Data Driven VC, a weekly newsletter read by 45,000+ investors and founders. An engineer by training, he did his PhD on data-driven venture capital between TU Munich and Cambridge and leads Earlybird's enterprise-software and AI investing practice.
How is AI used in venture capital?
In Retterath's model, AI handles the top of the funnel — sourcing and screening, where studies suggest roughly two-thirds of a VC's value is created — plus parts of due diligence and portfolio support. The approach is augmented rather than autonomous: models build and rank the funnel, but human partners still make the investment decision and sit on the board.
Tagged with
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Want more practical AI talks in Munich? Explore upcoming GenAI Wednesday events.
Event Details
- Venue: jambit GmbH, jambit MeetHub, Birketweg 21, 80639 München
- With the kind support of CompuSafe Data Systems AG & jambit GmbH
