How Airtree Uses Claude Cowork to Automate VC Research & Reporting

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.