DealsFlow: An Evidence-Gated Agentic Harness for Venture Capital Deal Triage

Abstract

Large language models (LLMs) can read startup pitch decks, but letting them emit investment scores directly invites score inflation, run-to-run variance and rationales that are hard to audit. We describe DealsFlow, a human-in-the-loop agentic harness deployed at a UK early-stage fund. The LLM reads the deck, cites evidence and rates each category; code combines the ratings, caps them and only ever lowers them. Three mechanisms implement this: a stage-aware corroboration ceiling (78, 70 or 60 out of 100) on factual categories without external evidence; a sceptic call that may lower but never raise a score; and a pre-fetch pattern that retrieves and indexes all evidence before a single generation pass. We evaluate on $N=243$ SEIS/EIS investments with recorded outcomes. Because recent investments have unresolved outcomes, we use the 142 that are at least three years old. There, the full pipeline's score has Spearman $\rho=0.45$ (95% CI 0.32 to 0.57) with the total-value multiple and AUC 0.71 for identifying write-offs, against $\rho=0.38$ and AUC 0.68 for an unconstrained LLM. The gain is small and comes mostly from the sceptic call; we did not test whether its lower-only rule matters. Investments that later exceeded $2\times$ had 64% of factual categories corroborated, against 38% for write-offs (omnibus Kruskal-Wallis test over five outcome groups, $p=0.031$), and our retrieval was not date-restricted, so these figures may overstate screening skill. In a study of 20 inbound applications, analyst time per application fell from 44.7 to 18.9 minutes including verification and correction, and 84% of 240 cited claims were fully supported by their sources, but 70% of reports needed at least one correction.