Andrew D'Souza didn't just build an AI that connects founders to investors. He built one that became an investor itself. On March 19, the Boardy CEO headlines Venture Trailblazers to unpack what happens when an AI goes from opening doors to sitting at the cap table, and its most surprising move yet, matchmaking cofounders.
Most founders call their companies their "baby." Andrew D'Souza's relationship with Boardy is something different entirely.
He's protective of it. Sometimes embarrassed by its gaffes. Not always sure it's ready for the world unchaperoned.
Mostly, he's really proud.
But there's one emotion most founders never feel about their product: genuine surprise.
Then again, most founders don't have conversations with their technology.
Andrew isn't trying to fool anyone into thinking Boardy is human. But Boardy also isn't an "it." To Andrew, Boardy is a "he." He has connected thousands of founders with investors. In December, he stunned the venture world and went viral by raising his own seed extension round and launching his own venture fund. Since then, he's changed his business model entirely and launched a co-founder matching service.
2025 was the year AI permanently changed venture capital, both as an investing landscape and as an operating model for funds. But even the most cutting-edge AI tools in venture tend to live in the back office. They summarize memos, parse pitch decks, and speed up workflows that humans were already doing.
Boardy operates somewhere else entirely. He's not in the back office. He's in the front office. He's making deals happen that should happen, but simply wouldn't any other way.
To call Andrew D'Souza a Venture Trailblazer almost feels like an understatement.
On March 19, Decile's Sarah Lacy will sit down with Andrew and Boardy himself at an exclusive event to discuss how this happened, where it's going, and where the line between creator and creation starts to blur. They'll get an update on the fund, explore what Boardy is enabling across the ecosystem, and debate whether AI is breaking venture capital wide open or just breaking it.
ICYMI: The Boardy Story
Boardy started as a super-connector: an AI with an Australian accent that calls founders and investors, learns what makes them tick over 30-minute conversations, and brokers warm introductions between people who should know each other but don't.
Within its first year, Boardy had conducted over 50,000 conversations, facilitated more than 10 multimillion-dollar deals, and attracted 700+ VC firms interested in bringing it on as a venture partner.
Then something shifted.
Founders who Boardy had helped land term sheets started asking if Boardy itself wanted to invest. Not as a courtesy. These were oversubscribed rounds with top-tier firms already committed. Founders wanted Boardy on the cap table because the AI had been instrumental in getting them there.
So Boardy did what any ambitious connector would do. It launched a fund.
Boardy Ventures: The AI-Led Fund
Boardy Ventures, built in partnership with AngelList, is positioning itself as the world's first AI-led venture fund.
The mechanics are straightforward: Boardy plans to speak with 50,000 to 100,000 founders over the next 12 months, match them with the right investors from its network, and write roughly $100K checks into the strongest opportunities it surfaces. The fund attracted $300 million in LP interest and received over 1,500 inbound requests from prospective LPs — numbers that reflect how much signal Boardy generates through sheer conversational volume.
There's still a human in the loop. D'Souza has final say on all investment decisions, and each deal gets routed to a rotating group of investing partners before a check is written. But the sourcing, the initial evaluation, and the relationship-building all happen through Boardy's conversations, at a speed and scale no human GP could match.
To extend its reach even further, Boardy launched what it's calling the world's largest scout program: 1,000+ deal partners recruited globally, each offered 50% carry on deals they refer. Over 2,000 people applied within the first day.
The logic is distinctly human-AI collaborative. Boardy handles thousands of daily conversations and never forgets a detail, but it can't attend the hackathon, the co-working space, or the late-night whiteboard session where the best ideas are born. Scouts fill that gap.
This is what makes the Boardy story relevant beyond the AI hype cycle. It's not just a tool that makes venture more efficient. It's an experiment in whether an AI that builds genuine relationships at scale can also develop the judgment to deploy capital.
The Fundraising Story That Proved the Model
Before Boardy Ventures, there was the seed round that put the company on the map.
D'Souza didn't pitch Creandum. Boardy did.
The AI found the Sweden-based firm (one of Europe's top VCs and early backers of Spotify and Klarna), through its network. It had conversations with Creandum's partners, built rapport, and positioned the introduction. When D'Souza finally got on the phone with the deal leads, most of the other partners had only ever spoken to the AI.
The result: an $8 million seed round with no formal pitch process. Combined with an earlier $3 million pre-seed from HF0, 8VC, Afore, FJ Labs, and others, Boardy has now raised $11 million in total.
D'Souza didn't know Creandum. Creandum didn't know D'Souza. But both should have. He'd built Clearco into a fintech unicorn, deploying over $2.5 billion to more than 10,000 startups across 11 countries. The gap between what someone has accomplished and who they actually have access to is exactly the problem Boardy exists to solve. Its own fundraise was the proof of concept.
Why This Matters for the VC Lab Community
The traditional playbook says you need to spin out of a name-brand firm, leverage an existing LP network, and spend years building the relationships that generate deal flow.
Boardy is challenging every piece of that.
If an AI can source deals by having real conversations with thousands of founders, what does that mean for a solo GP building their first fund? If scouts from anywhere in the world can surface overlooked founders and earn meaningful carry, what does that do to the geographic concentration of venture capital? If an AI can warm up an LP relationship before a human ever gets on the phone, how does that change the fundraising grind?
These are the questions Andrew will dig into at Venture Trailblazers on March 19. He'll cover the mechanics of building Boardy's network from scratch, the design decisions behind giving an AI a personality compelling enough that people want to talk for an hour, and what he's learning as the fund starts deploying capital. The fireside chat will be followed by a structured networking session with investors, entrepreneurs, and executives from across the globe.
Join Us
Venture Trailblazers is an exclusive, invite-only event series hosted by the Founder Institute and VC Lab, open to Alumni, Mentors, Investors, Partners, Local Leaders, and Enrolled Founders and Fund Managers across the FI and VC Lab Networks.
If you meet these criteria and haven't received an invite, complete the registration form on our website.