Capital flows from relationships; this VC wants investors building them, not mining spreadsheets

Unlike the growing wave of AI startups promising to transform investing itself, one Midwest-built software platform launched by an industry insider focuses on a much narrower problem for VCs: organizing the steady stream of quarterly updates, financial metrics, documents and communications that arrive from portfolio companies.

“It comes down to whether firms want their team to build relationships, meet more founders and LPs or maintain and continuously patch the tools they built,” said Josh Bartels, founder of Gather AI.

Bartels knows that workflow firsthand. 

As executive director of Nebraska Angels, he oversees a statewide angel investor network where much of the work extends well beyond sourcing investments. It’s an arena that gradually exposed a problem he realized many smaller venture firms quietly shared.

As every business quarter begins to wind down, venture investors’ inboxes begin filling with startup updates. Fundraising milestones, revenue figures, head counts, product launches and milestones, success stories and more. Most arrive as PDFs, attached spreadsheets or links. 

But before investors can use any of it, someone has to download those files, chase missing information, pull the numbers and organize everything into a system that leadership can look at for a hopefully complete sense of how their capital is being used.

For many of the country’s largest venture firms, dedicated operations teams handle much of that work. For many smaller funds, the investors complete it themselves.

“We’re trying to be that connector for all the tools within a startup investor’s tech stack and really make it easy for them to focus on the founders, focus on the LPs or the members of the investors that they’re also supporting rather than being dug deep in the weeds on admin tasks,” Bartels said. 

Gather automatically collects portfolio updates, culls key performance indicators from submitted documents, organizes them into structured datasets and makes the information searchable. The platform also maintains audit logs, preserves source documents, structures KPIs and includes a human review step before extracted data becomes part of a firm’s permanent records, Bartels said.

Those workflow features, rather than AI alone, are what separate Gather from simply asking Claude or ChatGPT to perform similar work, he said.

“In fact, we started by trying to build what became Gather directly in Claude,” Bartels said. “It either didn’t work or it would break.”

Instead of relying entirely on a general-purpose AI assistant, Bartels argues Gather packages those capabilities into software built specifically for venture investors, removing the burden of maintaining custom workflows as AI models continue evolving.

“A firm building this internally has to maintain it, keep it from breaking, ship improvements and re-integrate every time a new model comes out,” he said. “Gather stays ahead of what most firms can realistically build and keep running on their own.”

Ben Williamson, Grit Road Partners

That approach appealed to Omaha-based Grit Road Partners, one of Gather’s earliest customers.

For partner Ben Williamson, the platform wasn’t replacing a mature reporting operation. It was formalizing one.

“Aside from merely receiving and saving company updates, communication was exclusively ad hoc and usually verbal,” Williamson told Startland News.

The bigger concern, he said, wasn’t time spent entering data. It was the possibility that important information might simply be missed.

“The primary pain point was the real possibility of missing something, which could cause a portfolio company to fail or face a setback due to a lack of communication.”

Gather has already helped Williamson systematize portfolio reporting while making information easier to assemble for annual audits.

“It’s definitely a nice productivity tool,” he said. “Small firms generally don’t have admin or platform folks beyond the partners and investors, so it’s critical to use tools to fill the gaps.”

Gather typically saves firms 10 to 15 hours during a reporting cycle by reducing document management, follow-up emails, metric extraction and manual data entry, Bartels said, noting that estimate reflects benchmark comparisons across multiple firms rather than Grit Road’s individual experience.

The platform’s earliest customers have largely come from Bartels’ existing relationships within the Midwest venture ecosystem, including Nebraska Angels, Grit Road Partners, PGSA Venture Capital and MOVE Venture Capital.

It’s a natural place to begin, he said.

“We had relationships with many of our customers before Gather, which makes sense,” Bartels said. “We all share the pain point Gather solves, and the startup investment space is deeply relationship-driven.”

Those firms have since begun referring Gather within their own networks, while Bartels said the company’s next phase is expanding beyond its initial customer base.