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.
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Ensemble VC founding partners (L-R): Gopi Sundaramurthy, Collin West, Conrad Shang
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.
“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.”
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.
To read more about Unity, click here for the full news release.
To hear more about Ensemble’s investments, listen to this interview with co-founder Collin West and host Prashant Choubey on VC10X.
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
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