How Airtree Uses Claude Cowork to Automate VC Research & Reporting
Airtree, a $2 billion Australian venture capital firm, deployed Claude Cowork as shared firm-wide infrastructure to unify fragmented data across tools like Notion, Slack, Google Drive, and Affinity. The team built custom Skills to automate board meeting prep, market research, and portfolio reporting — cutting multi-hour tasks down to minutes. What began as individual productivity gains quickly scaled into a collaborative system where Skills built by one person benefit the entire firm.
Impact
Reduced from 2 days to minutes
Market & competitor research time
Reduced from 30 minutes to 2 minutes
Board meeting summary time
Reduced from 1 hour/day to minutes
Pre-meeting research time
2 hours per month
Marketing reporting time saved
700+
Onboarding course downloads
130+
Portfolio companies
$2 billion
Funds under management
~250 words
Board meeting Slack summary length
Challenge
Airtree's investment and operations teams were losing significant time to manual research and synthesis tasks, with critical information siloed across more than eight different platforms including Slack, Notion, Google Drive, and Affinity. This fragmentation slowed meeting preparation and reporting, eating into time that could be spent on high-value founder relationships and investment judgment.
Solution
Airtree deployed Claude Cowork as firm-wide shared infrastructure, connecting it to all major tools the team already used and building custom Skills to automate board meeting preparation, market research, portfolio reporting, and HR workflows. A structured one-hour onboarding course enabled both technical and non-technical staff to reach productivity quickly, and Skills built by individuals were made available across the entire firm.
Tools & Technologies
What Leaders Say
“Claude Cowork's value scales with the number of systems you connect it to. I've built a personal CRM with Claude Code that is connected to Cowork.”
“The value of AI in a workflow like ours isn't replacing judgment; it's in protecting the time and space for it.”
Sign up to read complete case studies, access detailed metrics, and unlock all use cases.
Full Story
Airtree is one of Australia and New Zealand's most active venture capital firms, managing $2 billion across a portfolio of 130+ companies including Canva, Airwallex, and Linktree. With a lean team covering thousands of founder meetings annually, the firm prides itself on moving fast and building deep relationships — but its operational reality told a different story. Critical information was scattered across Google Workspace, Slack, Notion, Affinity, Sigma, Webflow, and Typeform, making it slow and inefficient to synthesize insights before meetings or produce high-quality reports.
The core challenge wasn't a lack of data — it was fragmentation. Investors were spending hours each day on research and preparation tasks that left little time for the high-judgment work that actually defines great venture investing: founder relationships, diligence, and conviction. Ad-hoc dashboards and new Slack channels helped at the margins, but the team was still losing time to manual synthesis across disconnected systems.
Airtree's solution came in the form of Claude Cowork, Anthropic's agentic workspace product. After early adopters on the team discovered Claude Code over a winter break and saw dramatic productivity gains, the firm's Data Lead built a one-hour onboarding course tailored to different team functions. The accessible UI of Cowork lowered the barrier for non-technical staff, and the team progressively connected it to the tools they already used — Notion, Slack, Google Drive, Affinity, Gmail, Granola, Harmonic, Canva, and Webflow. Crucially, Skills built by one person could be shared and used by everyone, transforming Cowork from an individual tool into shared firm infrastructure.
The impact was immediate and measurable. The team built a board meeting preparation Skill that reads portfolio company Google Drive folders, searches Slack for updates, browses the web for competitor news, and cross-references previous board prep to track outstanding commitments. A Board Summary Skill cross-references live meeting notes against prep documents and automatically sends a ~250-word Slack summary with one command, while saving a detailed meeting record to Google Drive. Market and competitor research that previously took two days now takes minutes. Board meeting summaries dropped from 30 minutes to two minutes. Pre-meeting research that consumed an hour daily is now done in minutes, and the marketing team saves two hours per month on reporting.
Beyond the investment team, Cowork spread organically across functions. The Head of People used it to help staff write self-reviews calibrated to Airtree's performance frameworks. The Head of Marketing turned a dense media briefing into an interactive quiz app for spokesperson preparation. Airtree also published its internal Cowork onboarding course through its Open Source VC library, where it has been downloaded over 700 times by individuals at startups, funds, legal firms, and enterprise companies — a testament to the broader demand for practical AI adoption frameworks.
Amazon Bedrock