Yohei Nakajima isn’t just investing in AI startups — he’s a hardcore user and early adopter of the transformative technology.
Nakajima, the Seattle-area venture capitalist at Untapped Capital, started experimenting with generative AI tools in 2022 — before ChatGPT became mainstream.
These days he and his colleagues are using AI tools for just about everything: sourcing and assessing deals, data entry, marketing, and more.
Perhaps most unique is the way Nakajima builds and tests his own AI-powered ideas in public. For example, he vibe-coded a startup intelligence platform earlier this year — VCpedia — and went viral for Baby AGI, a popular open source autonomous agent project he released in 2023.
Untapped has also rolled out custom GPTs, including “Mean VC,” which helps startups refine their pitches and ideas. “Founders love using it,” Nakajima said.
Building in public has not only helped Nakajima get access to developer communities and identify trends — “we are treated like builders ourselves,” he said — but also acts as a valuable strategy for Untapped.
“It’s both R&D and marketing and relationship-building all tied into one,” he said. “And it allows us to have a strong pulse on how AI is used. When we share how we use AI, we get a lot of feedback from others on their experiences.”
It’s also led to investments. Untapped was building due diligence tools with AI and got introduced to Wokelo, a Seattle-based startup that was developing a similar product. Untapped invested in Wokelo’s pre-seed round in 2023.
For other firms or companies looking to integrate AI into their own workflows, Nakajima encourages execs to lead by example.
When he started getting questions from his colleagues that ChatGPT could answer, he’d start a thread with the bot and then share it with the team.
“By seeing me use ChatGPT regularly, and seeing the benefit of it, my team started to pick it up,” he said.
Nakajima, who grew up in the Seattle area and previously worked at Scrum Ventures and Techstars, is betting that companies will increasingly use AI to get work done.
“We’ll continue to see deep integrations of AI into human workflows, to a point where we’ll see AI doing more work than humans,” he said, referencing output measured by AI contribution vs. human output.
Nakajima said he’s interested in trends around agents and authorization; AI governance at larger companies, and consumer apps in industries such as film, gaming, or music that are native to generative AI.
Untapped describes itself as a pre-seed generalist investor focused on U.S. startups. It raised $9.5 million for its first fund and made 36 investments. Its average check size is between $250,000 and $500,000 into companies raising at valuations of $10 million or lower.
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