Black Matter VC is an operator-led studio building AI systems and internal tools for venture funds. Dealflow, platform, portfolio, finance — automated, integrated, owned by your team. Built by someone who ran fund operations for four years before doing this full-time.
Recent work with Firstminute, Northzone, Systemiq, Clean Energy Ventures, Active Impact.
PRE-SEED / SEED · LONDON
MULTI-STAGE · LONDON / STOCKHOLM / NYC / AMSTERDAM / BERLIN
CLIMATE-TECH · LONDON
CLIMATE-TECH · BOSTON
IMPACT · VANCOUVER
SMB FUND · US · FORMER EMPLOYEROne-line takeaways auto-summarized from the full reference. Click [+] on any row to expand the original quote and attribution.
Michael was a total game changer for our team. Before working with him, we were relying on manual, error-prone processes and disconnected spreadsheets that didn't talk to each other. He helped us replace that fragmentation with a fully custom portfolio management platform that reduced our reporting time by roughly 90% and made our data AI-queryable.
What sets Michael apart is that he deeply understands how venture funds actually operate. There was zero onboarding friction — I didn't have to explain the VC business model or our workflows. He acted as a true strategic partner, not just a developer, and consistently helped turn my ideas into a system that actually works in practice.
The end result is something we're genuinely proud to show to LPs and peers, and a real operational differentiator for our fund. Michael is reliable, thoughtful, and formidably capable — I would strongly recommend him to any fund looking to build serious internal tooling without hiring a full-time technical team.
Michael has been instrumental in helping us streamline and automate our workflows as a VC firm. His expertise has enabled us to integrate our systems seamlessly, improve knowledge sharing, and stay ahead of the curve with emerging technologies.
Thanks to his guidance, we've significantly increased efficiency, allowing us to focus more on what truly matters — supporting founders and making better investment decisions. If you're looking for someone who deeply understands automation and can transform your fund's operations, Michael is definitely the person to work with.
Working with Michael at Blackmatter VC has been a great experience. Michael was realistic about what we could build, demonstrating remarkable capability and clear communication throughout our collaboration.
We particularly appreciated Michael's thorough documentation of the work he completed and his use of low code/no code solutions, which should enable us to manage what he has built independently. Michael's responsiveness ensured seamless collaboration despite our different time zones. We're looking forward to continuing to work with him in the future.
It's hard to overstate the impact Michael had during his tenure at Calm Company Fund. Where most people see constraints, Michael sees blank canvases — then promptly fills them with elegant no-code automations and AI-powered workflows no one else had even imagined. He architected internal tools that multiplied our capacity to handle a flood of inbound emails, streamlined founder–mentor matchmaking for hundreds of portfolio companies, and surfaced insights that previously took us days to uncover.
Michael combines meticulous attention to detail with a bias for action. He listens, probes for the root need, and then delivers solutions that feel almost magical in their simplicity and power. Time after time, he shipped products that gave our lean team the leverage of a staff several times larger — all while maintaining clear documentation and a responsive, collaborative style.
If you're looking for someone who can translate big ideas into working systems, amplify the effectiveness of everyone around him, and do it with humility and grace, Michael is that person. I recommend him without reservation.
Most consultant sites are past tense. This one isn’t. Below is a live, filterable feed of the builds, releases, essays, and threads that are actively coming out of Black Matter VC — updated as I ship, not when I get around to a “case study.” If you want to know whether I can build the thing you need, look here first.
What shipped, what flipped, and the eight posts worth your click — so you don't have to scroll X all weekend. The week output got free and judgment got expensive.
The pillars that don't move, the ones that do, and how to tell them apart. Five owned layers, two rental layers, and the architecture that survives the next eighteen months of model and agent churn.
The Lab is Claude-designed, Claude-coded, and fed by a swarm of routine agents wired into every public endpoint of the company. Here's what's under the hood — and what it costs to run.
The week 'forward-deployed engineer' stopped being a niche services title and started looking like AI's most-coveted role — plus what shipped, what flipped, the eight must-reads.
I've been building software for over a decade. I founded Junglebee in 2016. A few weeks ago, I decided to rebuild the entire platform from scratch — no engineering team, no sprints, just me and AI coding agents.
I didn't plan to spend $1,300 on Perplexity Computer this month. Or max out both my OpenAI and Claude Max plans at $200 each. Here's the honest breakdown of every AI agent tool I tested — what actually works, what's hype, and what I'd do differently.
X argued all week whether forward-deployed engineering is a goldrush, a vertical-AI signpost, or a phase the labs disband. From the fund-platform side, it is none of those. It is the work.
Garry Tan said tokenmax. Aaron Levie said a model update killed someone's year of scaffolding. Simon Willison said even framework lock-in is reversible. They're all arguing the same thing.
I don’t sell “AI strategy.” I build the systems. The map below is how I think about the surface area of a venture fund — and what concretely gets built in each area. Every project lives in one of these four boxes.
Inbound, outbound, warm intros, cold decks — captured, parsed, scored, and routed without an analyst manually copy-pasting into Affinity at 11pm.
KPIs out of board decks, reporting that doesn’t take three days, a single source of truth the team actually trusts and LPs are impressed by.
Slack bots, dashboards, briefing tools — the small, sharp interfaces that make ten people feel like thirty without anyone hiring a CTO.
Cap tables, capital calls, distributions, expense flows — the parts of fund ops where mistakes cost the most. AI here is about reliability, not novelty.
Three engagements that show how the work actually lands. Each one ran in the open — the fund team owned the result on day one and runs it without me today.
CLIENT — Active Impact Investments · climate-tech VC · Vancouver
Portfolio data lived across more than 30 disconnected spreadsheets. Quarterly reporting consumed several days of the VP of Ops’s week. Nothing was queryable. LP updates were stitched together by hand.
~90% reductionin reporting time. Platform now answers questions like “which companies are ahead on revenue but behind on hiring?” in one Slack DM. Used as an operational differentiator with LPs.
CLIENT — Northzone · multi-stage European VC
Material increase in operational efficiency without disrupting the existing stack. The team kept focus on founders and investment decisions, not on tool maintenance.
CLIENT — Firstminute Capital · pre-seed/seed · London
A platform layer the team owns end-to-end. No ongoing dependency on Black Matter VC to keep it running. Engagement continues on new workstreams as needs emerge.
Every consulting engagement leaves behind a pattern. Some patterns are worth productizing. These are the ones that escaped the engagement and now run on their own.
Pre-meeting briefs, delivered automatically. Pulls LinkedIn, Affinity, and email history into a single pre-meeting brief, straight to your inbox before every call. No more scrambling before founder meetings or LP calls — just open the email five minutes before and walk in informed.
Auto-detects pitch decks in your inbox (PDFs + DocSend links, including password-protected chains), extracts company info with AI, writes everything to your CRM.
Free DocSend → PDF converter. Route converted files to Drive, SharePoint, Dropbox, Affinity, HubSpot — anywhere.
Slack bot that searches across your fund team’s LinkedIn graph. “Do we know any stealth founders?” answered in seconds.
In production · multiple versions deployed. Plain-English questions over your Affinity CRM (companies, deals, co-investors, notes, network) — queryable from Slack and via Custom GPT in ChatGPT.
Catches board decks in your inbox, pulls out KPIs, summarizes for partners. No more “did we get this quarter’s numbers?”
In production at Firstminute Capital. Automatic invoice detection in the CFO’s inbox, parsed and pushed straight into the bookkeeping software. The quiet plumbing that kills the monthly admin scramble.
No tiers, no discovery decks, no statement-of-work theatre. A single monthly retainer that covers everything from audit to ship to ongoing operations. You bring problems, I bring shipped systems.
I work as your embedded operator. Audit, design, build, deploy, maintain, train your team — across dealflow, portfolio, platform, internal ops, and finance. Whatever your fund needs that month, shipped that month. Your team owns every system I build.
In 2020 I joined Calm Company Fund (then Earnest Capital) as the third hire — head of no-code engineering. The brief was simple: automate everything possible at the fund.
We grew to a team of twelve people. It would have been much bigger if we hadn’t automated relentlessly across dealflow, platform, and finance. I built the internal tools that let a small fund punch well above its weight, and I learned how venture funds actually operate — not how they describe themselves in pitch decks.
When Calm Fund went on pause in 2024, I started Black Matter VC. Since then I’ve been embedded with funds across the US and Europe — Firstminute, Northzone, Systemiq, Clean Energy Ventures, Active Impact — building the AI systems that actually stick. Dealflow, platform, portfolio, finance.
I write about what I’m learning every week. Everything I ship leaves the team able to maintain it themselves. The point isn’t to make funds dependent on me — it’s to make the operating layer of a fund compound the way the portfolio is supposed to.
— Michael, founder · Black Matter VC
