Every VC team we speak to today is asking the same question: Where does AI fit into my investment process? And more specifically: Should we build our own AI, use a third-party vertical AI platform, or cobble together a collection of generic AI tools and hope it holds?

Full disclosure - we’re biased. We started Savantiq because stitching together 17 browser tabs, 5 data vendors, and a junior analyst named Tom didn’t feel like a long-term solution. But bias aside, this decision genuinely matters.

Option 1: Build It Yourself - Maximum Control, Maximum Pain

Building your own AI stack sounds glamorous. You get full control, bespoke models, and bragging rights about your in-house Data Science / AI team. The problem? Most organisations underestimate the real costs: data engineering, security reviews, model maintenance, and GPU bills. And beyond that, the difficulty is not plugging into OpenAI’s API, it’s building everything around it.

Unless you're a tech company with engineering capacity to spare, this path often ends in “we tried, but it’s harder than it looks.”

Option 2: Cobble Together Generic AI - Fast Start, Messy Reality

The second path is the patchwork quilt. A prompt library here, a generic LLM there, a few Chrome extensions for flavour, maybe Dropbox and Slack sprinkled on top. This works brilliantly for a few weeks. Then your team realises:

• nothing talks to anything else,
• outputs aren’t consistent
• you can’t control data flows, 
• the process is not systematic, and
• half the team is using unapproved tools.

It’s the AI equivalent of building a house out of IKEA parts. It looks fine until someone leans on it.

Option 3: Turn to a Vertical AI Platform - Designed for Fast, Meaningful ROI

While a generic system is smart, it doesn’t know how you work or what’s important straight out of the box. A vertical solution gives you the configurations and integrations that matter, all fully tuned to your use case.

Also, importantly, they are designed to function as part of a systematic investment process, not as a standalone chat assistant or material generator.

A vertical platform gives you:

• domain-specific context,
• structured workflows,
• security and compliance baked in,
• audit tails and consistent reasoning built in
• and insights that map directly to how deals get done.

All in a timeline and at a cost a fraction of a self-built system.

So What Should VC Teams Do?

If you have significant time, budget, and engineering talent, build. If you enjoy chaos, cobble.
But if you need something that accelerates screening, DD, pipeline and workflow management now, a vertical platform is the pragmatic choice.

And yes - we admit we’re biased. We built Savantiq precisely because the other two paths weren’t delivering what investment teams actually need.

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