• Marc Palet, a tech VC, uses AI tools to boost his productivity.
• He said he uses tools like Claude and Lovable to build automated workflows for himself.
• This allows him to meet more founders and source better deals for the firm.

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Marc Palet, 26, a Singapore-based venture capitalist at OMVC. The following has been edited for length and clarity.

I was first exposed to venture capital while running an e-commerce fashion business in college back home in Barcelona. During a study abroad program in Hong Kong, I did a ton of networking and came across a VC firm investing in fintech, blockchain, and AI — all the things I liked. I ended up staying with them after graduation and spent three years in Hong Kong before moving to Singapore to lead the firm's Asia Pacific investments.

I'm 26 now and have invested in over 12 AI companies since I started my VC career. AI isn't just a part of my portfolio; it's become a crucial part of my workflow and how I manage things as the firm's only employee outside the US.

Even though I've vibe-coded many of my workflows, AI hasn't replaced any of my software subscriptions. It's actually added more, since I pay more than $120 a month across Claude, ChatGPT, n8n, and other AI tools like transcription APIs.

But I'd be happy to spend more if it makes me more productive.

Here's what my tech stack looks like and how it has helped shave countless hours of operational work.

Summarizing founder meetings

I started using ChatGPT in 2023. But the real shift came when I began using coding tools like Claude Code, Cursor, and Replit.

One of the first things I built for work automatically summarizes my meetings with founders.

We record our meetings using Fireflies. Instead of manually listening back and writing investment notes after every meeting, I receive a structured summary covering the company's problem, solution, market, and other information we capture during due diligence.

My first knowledge base

One recurring problem was that if I weren't at my laptop, I'd read something interesting on LinkedIn or X and then forget all about it.

So creating repositories on NotebookLM was a turning point for me. Every time I read something online that I thought I wanted to remember, I'd copy and paste it into that repository.

Whenever I wanted to write a blog post, I could query it and retrieve all the information I needed.

Building a company brain

The stage I'm in now started a couple of months ago, after I read something OpenAI founding member Andrej Karpathy wrote about building a knowledge base that automatically ingests information and keeps updating itself. I thought that was really interesting, so I built something similar for venture capital using Claude Code.

It pulls information from Gmail, Slack, my call transcription service, newsletters, YouTube podcasts, and anywhere else I get knowledge or updates on our portfolio companies. An AI agent parses the raw information, then organizes it into the right place.

Each portfolio company has pages for things like fundraising, financials, and commercial updates. If there's a new Slack message, the AI figures out which company it's about and updates the relevant page. And it doesn't just copy and paste new information — it rewrites the page so everything stays coherent.

More powerful than an intern

One workflow automatically creates our quarterly limited partner reports by summarizing everything that's happened across our portfolio during the reporting period. Another helps with audit work by gathering information from all our portfolio companies.

Those tedious tasks that used to take up so much of my time. For a VC fund as small as ours, time is always a constraint, so I'm happy to spend on AI that can save me time.

My agents for LinkedIn posts, an important part of my role, have helped me increase my output from one deep-dive article every two months to one every three weeks. Every article brings in more deal flow, and because I'm spending less time on operational work, I have more time for in-person meetings.

I realized that AI is much more efficient than training an intern for a month, only for them to stay for three months. AI also does things the way I want them done. I realized that AI plus me is more powerful than me plus an intern.

• Rudrojas Kunvar, 16, built Evion, an AI tool that helps farmers analyze crop health.
• The tool collects aerial crop data from drone-captured images.
• Kunvar created Evion to make that data more accessible to small and midsize farms.

While meeting with a venture capitalist last year, 16-year-old Rudrojas Kunvar received an offer that would excite even the most nonchalant teens: accept $300,000 to drop out of high school and run his AI startup full-time.

"It was definitely a rough couple of weeks of contemplating," Kunvar, who lives in Germantown, Maryland, told Business Insider. "That's a lot of money."

Kunvar had spent the summer before building Evion, a free AI crop-analysis tool that uses images taken by basic camera drones that farmers can purchase themselves.

The AI model analyzes images and generates a crop health map that farmers can integrate into their existing platforms or access via a dashboard. Green means healthy, while red means unhealthy.

"Farmers can use that to predict the future of their crops," Kunvar said. "You can see what areas need more water or fertilizer, rather than just spraying everywhere."

Like construction and defense, drones are reshaping America's agriculture industry. There were about 5,500 agricultural drones registered with the Federal Aviation Administration in 2025, up from about 1,000 in 2024, according to Michigan State University researchers.

Kunvar said Evion can help farmers save money because the targeted data can eliminate crop health uncertainty, meaning they'll be less likely to waste water or fertilizer.

Kunvar says Evion is positioned as an alternative to companies that market pricey agricultural drone products or services. Instead, farmers can buy cheap camera drones, take their own photos, and upload the information themselves.

"It's meant to be a more affordable plan for these low to mid-scale farms," Kunvar.

After building Evion, Kunvar partnered with Jacob Lee, who has experience creating tech tools, to expand its reach. Kunvar launched the initial pilot in the fall.

Ultimately, Kunvar declined the $300,000 drop-out offer, saying he wanted to ensure his product remained accessible and didn't get wrapped up in chasing profits.

It all started with a question

The idea behind Evion came during Kunvar's sophomore year at Poolesville High School in Montgomery County while attending a community festival. One-third of Montgomery County is designated as an Agricultural Reserve, or protected local land meant to preserve rural space.

"I asked a farmer about how they're able to tell when a disease is coming or what slight discoloration means," Kunvar said. "Essentially, he said he's guessing. I spoke to a few other farmers, and I realized there was a common thread among all of their responses."

Kunvar, who said he's had a lifelong love for technology, was surprised.

"We've had a lot of AI advancements in various verticals and various industries," he said. "Why isn't there much happening for agriculture?"

Initially, Kunvar wanted to make his own fleet of fully autonomous drones that could capture the data, but went a different direction after talking with mentors and crunching the numbers. Instead, he studied drones and pinpointed what's driving their cost: the multispectral camera.

"The camera was the leading cost. I wondered, 'What if there's a way to get similar data without needing this camera? What if I could use a simple camera?'" Kunvar said.

He pointed toward Tesla and its autonomous vehicles as proof it work. Unlike Waymo and other companies that use lidar, Tesla relies on cameras.

After setting up the logistics and AI model, the founders sought clients by sending cold emails and LinkedIn messages. They found better luck, however, partnering with agriculture-oriented nonprofits and organizations to reach farmers.

Now, the technology is helping farmers in North America, Southeast Asia, and India.

As for his future plans, Kunvar wants to continue growing Evion while exploring opportunities in different fields, including AI infrastructure.

"There's so much ambiguity in entrepreneurship, especially in startups, but I've learned there's beauty in ambiguity," Kunvar said. "There's been times where nothing's working out, and then you have the tiniest win, and it's like, 'wow, maybe I can do this.'"

• Young tech startup founders are having a moment in the AI era.
• From teenagers to 20-somethings, these founders are raising millions.
• Take a look at the pitch decks some of these founders shared with Business Insider.

Tech is no stranger to young founders.

Steve Jobs was 21 when he cofounded Apple in 1976. Mark Zuckerberg was 19 when Facebook launched. Whitney Wolfe Herd was 25 when she unveiled Bumble.

Many of today's startup founders are still young and scrappy. And in the age of AI, they're even more empowered to barrel ahead.

Some are following the footsteps of tech titans before them and dropping out of college. Others are opting out of the undergraduate experience altogether, with a few ditching high school to pursue careers in tech.

Arlan Rakhmetzhanov, founder of AI coding startup Nozomio, told Business Insider that he dropped out of high school in Kazakhstan after getting accepted into the competitive startup accelerator program, Y Combinator (YC). At the age of 18, he raised $6.2 million for Nozomio.

Rakhmetzhanov isn't the only teenager finding success in AI. There's also Toby Brown, a UK teen who raised $1 million for his AI project. There's also Zach Yadegari, the teenage cofounder of Cal AI, a nutrition app.

College-aged founders are also building companies and raising capital, such as the Yale students behind Series AI, a new social networking startup.

The median age for YC participants is now 24 years old, compared to 30 in 2022, YC's Pete Koomen told The New York Times in August.

Business Insider has interviewed the founders of 12 startups who are 25 years old or younger and have raised millions in funding since 2024 about the pitch decks they used to impress investors.

Read 12 pitch decks founders who are 25 years old or younger used to raise millions:

Note: Founders were 25 or younger when Business Insider published the following articles.

Series A

• Posh, an events platform, raised a $22 million Series A when its founders were 23. Read the 12-page pitch deck it used.
• Clyx, a startup trying to connect people via in-person events, raised a $14 million Series A when its founder was 25. Read 22 pages of its deck.

Seed

• Ditto, an AI dating startup founded by UC Berkeley dropouts, raised $9.2 million when the founders were 23 and 24. Read its 12-page pitch deck.
• Lyra, an AI video call startup, raised a $6 million seed out of YC when its founder was 23. Read the 8-slide pitch deck it used.
• Nexad, an AI adtech startup, raised a $6 million seed after wrapping up A16z's Speedrun accelerator. Nexad's CEO was 25. Read the 10-page pitch deck.
• Orange Slice, a YC-backed sales tech platform, raised $5.3 million when its founders were 23. Read the 7-page pitch deck.
• Golpo, a generative AI video startup, raised a $4.1 million seed out of YC when its founders — who are also brothers — were 19 and 20. Read its 7-page pitch deck.
• Bluejay, an AI agent startup, raised a $4 million seed coming out of YC when its founders were 23. Read its 9-page pitch deck.
• Novoflow, an agentic AI startup building tools for medical clinics, raised $3.1 million when its founders were 18 and 19. Read its pitch deck.
• CodeFour, an AI police tech startup, was founded by two 19-year-old MIT dropouts and raised $2.7 million coming out of YC. Read the pitch deck.
• Cerca, a dating app that connects people with mutual friends, raised a $1.6 million seed when its CEO was 23. Read the 10-slide deck.

Pre-seed

• Series, an AI social networking startup, raised a $3.1 million pre-seed when its founders were 21.

This story has been updated with additional examples.