Intern Project
Charlie Boggs
Duke University • Junior
Emerging Startup Tracker
The Visible Ventures Emerging Startup Tracker is an automated AI-powered pipeline that monitors public startup data sources on a weekly cadence and delivers a curated investment brief to the Visible Ventures Foundation Fund team. The system pulls emerging startup signals from Y Combinator’s company database, Hacker News, Product Hunt, and TechCrunch, then uses Claude to evaluate each startup against the fund’s investment thesis, identifying companies operating at the intersection of Gen Z, the $30T wealth transfer, and broken legacy systems across the Health, Wealth, and Upward Mobility pillars.
The output is a formatted weekly brief delivered automatically via Gmail every Monday at 7am. The original vision included social media monitoring across Instagram, TikTok, and LinkedIn via Apify scrapers, but due to platform API restrictions and scraper reliability issues, the system was refocused on higher-quality news and community sources, which ultimately produced cleaner and more actionable signals for early-stage startup discovery.
The system pulls data from four sources: the Y Combinator company database via an Apify Actor, Hacker News posts via the Algolia API, Product Hunt daily launches via the GraphQL API, and TechCrunch articles via RSS feed. Results from all four sources are merged and passed into a batch prompt builder, where Claude evaluates each startup against the fund thesis and surfaces the strongest momentum signals. The final output is a structured weekly investment brief delivered via Gmail containing thesis-matched startups, signal explanations, and a short note on relevance to the fund’s three pillars.
Emerging Startup Tracker — UI Images
Inputs
- Y Combinator company database (Apify Actor)
- Hacker News posts (Algolia API)
- Product Hunt daily launches (GraphQL API)
- TechCrunch articles (RSS feed)
Outputs
- Structured weekly investment brief delivered via Gmail every Monday at 7am
- thesis-matched startups with signal explanations and relevance to Health, Wealth, and Upward Mobility pillars
About Charlie Boggs
Charlie Boggs is a junior at Duke University studying Electrical and Computer Engineering with a minor in Finance, originally from Bethesda, Maryland. He is passionate about the intersection of technology and finance and how emerging tools like AI are reshaping the way industries operate and invest.
“During my internship at Visible Ventures, I built an end-to-end AI automation pipeline using n8n and Claude that monitors public startup data sources and generates weekly investment briefs aligned to the fund’s thesis. I learned how to work with real APIs, design agentic workflows, and prompt large language models for structured analytical output. I gained firsthand exposure to how AI tools are leveraged in the venture capital setting to automate workflows and improve productivity.”
— Charlie Boggs