
Holiday Gift Guide: ADIN
We asked scouts what they’re buying this season, from Kapital bandanas to a robot guinea pig.

Optics as Compute: Why ADIN Backed Diffraqtion’s Quantum Camera
Diffraqtion just announced their $4.2M pre-seed round. They're using tech to rebuild the retina; it’s a programmable quantum lens that shapes light before the sensor.

Effects of Generative AI-Powered Venture Screening
a hybrid of LLM infrastructure and investor judgment is the way

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Holiday Gift Guide: ADIN
We asked scouts what they’re buying this season, from Kapital bandanas to a robot guinea pig.

Optics as Compute: Why ADIN Backed Diffraqtion’s Quantum Camera
Diffraqtion just announced their $4.2M pre-seed round. They're using tech to rebuild the retina; it’s a programmable quantum lens that shapes light before the sensor.

Effects of Generative AI-Powered Venture Screening
a hybrid of LLM infrastructure and investor judgment is the way
Svedka aired the first "primarily AI-generated" Super Bowl ad. $8 million for 30 seconds. Over 127 million people watching. And robots, generated entirely by artificial intelligence, were the stars.
The Super Bowl has always been a cultural barometer. When crypto companies bought ads in 2022, it signaled they'd arrived in the mainstream. When AI companies started going head-to-head during the 2026 Big Game, it signaled something bigger.
Anthropic ran ads directly attacking OpenAI. Their tagline: "Ads are coming to AI. But not to Claude."
Sam Altman fired back on X, calling it "clearly dishonest."
Meanwhile, OpenAI's own ad featured human creativity alongside ChatGPT. Google showcased Nano Banana Pro image generation. Meta pushed AI glasses as "athletic intelligence." Amazon's Alexa+ ad joked about AI plotting against humans. Ramp, Rippling, and Wix all leaned heavily into AI automation.
The message from Madison Avenue was clear: AI isn't a feature anymore. It's the product.

The numbers tell the same story. AI companies captured 46% of all venture capital funding last year. And 92% of VCs now report using AI tools in their workflows, according to PitchBook data.
The industry that prides itself on seeing the future is finally living in it.
But most firms are still just bolting ChatGPT onto their existing processes. Summarizing pitch decks, drafting emails, generating market analysis. That's useful, but it's not transformative.
The real opportunity is rethinking how the work gets done entirely.
The traditional venture workflow was built for a world of information scarcity. Deal flow came from personal networks. Research got compiled over weeks. Due diligence meant slogging through documents manually.
That world is gone.
Today, the bottleneck isn't access to information. It's processing it. There are more startups, more data sources, more signals than any team can realistically synthesize. The edge has shifted from who you know to how fast you can learn.
This is what we're building at ADIN. Not a chatbot sitting on top of a database, but a research platform that can instantly analyze fund documents, surface competitive intelligence, generate due diligence questions, and track portfolio companies across thousands of signals.
The Super Bowl showed us AI generating advertisements. But the more interesting transformation is happening in cognitive work. The research, analysis, and pattern recognition that investors do every day.
The firms investing in these workflows now are going to compound their advantages over time. If you can evaluate five times more deals with the same team, surface insights ten times faster, and cut due diligence timelines from weeks to days, you're not just a little better. You're operating differently.
We think Super Bowl LX will be remembered as an inflection point. The moment AI stopped being something discussed at conferences and became something 127 million people watched during halftime.
For venture, that means AI-native startups will become the norm, not the exception. Founders who don't build with AI will face harder questions about defensibility. And the human elements like judgment, relationships, and conviction will matter more, not less, as AI handles more of the analytical load.
The AI does the diligence. The network does the thinking. The call does the deciding. And capital moves at the speed it should: toward the best ideas, surfaced by the people closest to them.
Interested in joining the network? Learn more →
For LP inquiries: hello@adin.online
Svedka aired the first "primarily AI-generated" Super Bowl ad. $8 million for 30 seconds. Over 127 million people watching. And robots, generated entirely by artificial intelligence, were the stars.
The Super Bowl has always been a cultural barometer. When crypto companies bought ads in 2022, it signaled they'd arrived in the mainstream. When AI companies started going head-to-head during the 2026 Big Game, it signaled something bigger.
Anthropic ran ads directly attacking OpenAI. Their tagline: "Ads are coming to AI. But not to Claude."
Sam Altman fired back on X, calling it "clearly dishonest."
Meanwhile, OpenAI's own ad featured human creativity alongside ChatGPT. Google showcased Nano Banana Pro image generation. Meta pushed AI glasses as "athletic intelligence." Amazon's Alexa+ ad joked about AI plotting against humans. Ramp, Rippling, and Wix all leaned heavily into AI automation.
The message from Madison Avenue was clear: AI isn't a feature anymore. It's the product.

The numbers tell the same story. AI companies captured 46% of all venture capital funding last year. And 92% of VCs now report using AI tools in their workflows, according to PitchBook data.
The industry that prides itself on seeing the future is finally living in it.
But most firms are still just bolting ChatGPT onto their existing processes. Summarizing pitch decks, drafting emails, generating market analysis. That's useful, but it's not transformative.
The real opportunity is rethinking how the work gets done entirely.
The traditional venture workflow was built for a world of information scarcity. Deal flow came from personal networks. Research got compiled over weeks. Due diligence meant slogging through documents manually.
That world is gone.
Today, the bottleneck isn't access to information. It's processing it. There are more startups, more data sources, more signals than any team can realistically synthesize. The edge has shifted from who you know to how fast you can learn.
This is what we're building at ADIN. Not a chatbot sitting on top of a database, but a research platform that can instantly analyze fund documents, surface competitive intelligence, generate due diligence questions, and track portfolio companies across thousands of signals.
The Super Bowl showed us AI generating advertisements. But the more interesting transformation is happening in cognitive work. The research, analysis, and pattern recognition that investors do every day.
The firms investing in these workflows now are going to compound their advantages over time. If you can evaluate five times more deals with the same team, surface insights ten times faster, and cut due diligence timelines from weeks to days, you're not just a little better. You're operating differently.
We think Super Bowl LX will be remembered as an inflection point. The moment AI stopped being something discussed at conferences and became something 127 million people watched during halftime.
For venture, that means AI-native startups will become the norm, not the exception. Founders who don't build with AI will face harder questions about defensibility. And the human elements like judgment, relationships, and conviction will matter more, not less, as AI handles more of the analytical load.
The AI does the diligence. The network does the thinking. The call does the deciding. And capital moves at the speed it should: toward the best ideas, surfaced by the people closest to them.
Interested in joining the network? Learn more →
For LP inquiries: hello@adin.online
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3 comments
>svedka aired the first "primarily ai-generated" super bowl ad. >anthropic ran spots attacking openai. >altman fired back sunday was weird. wrote about it ↓
felt like a fever dream watching it all go down, definitely a weird one
Super Bowl LX featured AI-generated ads, signaling AI as a product. Svedka spent $8M for 30 seconds, with campaigns from Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, Meta, and Amazon. The piece argues real change is rethinking cognitive work via AI-native workflows, led by ADIN’s research platform. @adinonline