Avlok Kohli on AngelList's role in venture and the evolving startup ecosystem

Summary

Avlok Kohli, CEO of AngelList, has run the company for nearly six years after being recruited in. Before that, he founded three companies, selling one to Square, where he stayed through the IPO.

The refounding

The AngelList most people remember from the 2010s was really three loosely connected businesses: the SPV/syndicate business, a startup talent platform, and Product Hunt, which AngelList had acquired. By 2018–2019, the shared thread — founders need capital, talent, and a launch platform — wasn't enough to hold them together under one business model. Talent spun off, Product Hunt separated, and when Kohli joined, he took the SPV business and incorporated it as its own company. From there, AngelList expanded into venture funds, invented the rolling fund category, moved into rollup vehicles, and added startup products. It now positions itself as the full-stack platform for launching and scaling a venture fund, and also manages scout funds for large established firms.

Product velocity

Kohli attributes the acceleration in product output to team composition. A high percentage of AngelList's staff are ex-founders, which he says creates a natural bias toward ambition and adjacent product expansion. The internal filter for new products: would this exist without us? If the answer is yes, AngelList steps back.

AI deployment

AngelList is applying AI in two directions. Internally, it is automating back-office workflows across fund administration — a domain where, as Kohli notes, the tolerance for model variability is zero. Share prices and financial records need one answer, not ten. The goal is to move human staff up to higher-judgment work rather than replace them.

The second application is a front-facing intelligence product, currently in beta and not yet publicly named, that Kohli describes as a co-GP tool. It queries aggregated, anonymized AngelList data alongside third-party sources to answer deal-sourcing questions — for example, which founders left OpenAI in the last month to start a company. It also aims to prepare investors for pitch meetings in real time and generate market maps post-pitch. A founder-facing version is in development: upload a deck, get a predicted round price based on actual private market comparables rather than the handful of recent deals a given investor happens to remember.

Capital flows and market structure

AngelList's internal data shows capital flows into venture funds nearly doubled from Q1 2024 to Q1 2025. But the recovery is concentrated. Kohli draws a divide between managers raising under $100 million and the mega-firms, with the middle increasingly squeezed. The crossover dynamic from 2021–2022 — when private equity and public market firms rushed into venture — has largely unwound. Now it is venture firms themselves that are scaling up and pushing into adjacent asset classes.

At the earliest stages, Kohli sees a supply-demand imbalance running the other direction: too much capital chasing pre-seed and seed deals at a moment when AI-era startups need less money to get started. The result is upward pressure on early-stage valuations, and an access problem that he expects to worsen.

AI and the GP role

Kohli does not see AI displacing general partners. His argument is that founders choose investors because they believe that person raises their probability of success — through brand, operational help, and access to networks. An AI cannot make a GP likable or win allocation in a competitive deal. The tools AngelList is building are designed to amplify investors, not replace them, and he expects the power law in venture returns to concentrate further as better tooling gives the best investors more leverage over deal analysis and market mapping.

Stablecoins

AngelList added stablecoin support around 2021 after aggressive LP demand. None of the established providers fit the use case, so AngelList worked with a startup that has since rebranded as Rail (rail.io) to build the infrastructure. The primary use case is not fund-to-company disbursements, where same-day wires work fine, but international LP capital calls. SWIFT transfers can take days and frequently stall without explanation. Stablecoins compress that to a single hop into the US, with the same compliance requirements.

Defense tech

Kohli says defense tech investment on AngelList has not slowed. He frames it as the early stages of a sustained push to modernize US military and naval technology rather than a bubble in the process of deflating — though he acknowledges the bubble framing has some validity. His read is that a few durable companies will emerge from the cycle regardless.