Artisanal Venture Capital

Happy Tuesday Brex Community,

I read this post on X about how Neo sourced their investment in Cursor, it was a refreshing read as it focused on how building a relationship over time and adding value, solidified their opportunity to invest. At a time when venture seems to be more transactional than ever before, I hope we can see more stories like this, where the old craft of venture capital is still being practiced. There is still a place for speed and transactional business style in venture, particularly in the growth/late stages but at the earliest stage of venture, would like to see more value provided by investors pre investment and a true relationship (both by founders and investors) being fostered.

Have a great week!

Shai Goldman

Ori by OriginalisAI: The Operating System For Private Capital

Problem: Private capital is moving faster and becoming more information dense, yet most AI tools stop at the model. Investors are manually stitching together models, CRMs, spreadsheets, prompts, and connectors, but these fragmented systems don’t remember, don’t compound institutional knowledge, and don’t truly learn how a firm thinks or makes decisions. The model is only ~20% of the work, the hard 80% is the architecture between the model and the investor.

Solution: Ori is the intelligence, memory, and workflow layer (the “harness”) built by OriginalisAI underneath its AI native platform. It turns core venture workflows into simple, callable primitives—/memo, /diligence, /network, /landscape, and /data-room—that run anywhere investors already work (Slack, Claude, Originalis web app, and more surfaces coming). Ori reasons across your memory, network, firm context, and past workflows to execute work, surface relevant intelligence, and improve over time. It starts personal (bottoms up onboarding for any investor) and scales into shared firm intelligence. The complexity lives underneath: persistent reasoning reconstruction, institutional learning, and execution that compounds with every interaction.

Why Now: A new generation of investors is already building their own internal AI systems because legacy software wasn’t designed for this era. As private capital grows more competitive and programmable, the firms that win won’t just have access to models, they’ll have systems that remember, execute, and continuously get smarter. Ori delivers exactly that native harness today, turning fragmented tools into a cohesive, learning operating layer for private capital. Early access is now open.

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