AI is not a feature. It is how we ship.

The conversation about AI in venture studios usually starts in the wrong place. The question is framed as: which AI features should the portfolio companies add to their products? That framing is too narrow.

The interesting question, the one that actually moves the needle on a portfolio, is whether AI is changing the operating layer of how the companies work, not just the surface layer of what they ship.

Three ventures, three operating layers

Inside DevCode Identity, AI now sits in the audit layer. Flagged cases come with model-generated reasoning that compliance officers review and approve. The product feature, KYC orchestration, did not change. What changed is the speed and quality of the human-in-the-loop step.

Inside PayControl, AI is in routing and fraud. The product feature, payment orchestration, is already a known category. What changed is that routing decisions can be tuned to the merchant own data, and fraud signals get better the more transactions flow through.

Inside AccountIQ, AI enhances analytics, anomaly detection, trend analysis, and operational insights, while the reconciliation itself remains reliable, rule-based, and auditable. The product feature, reconciliations SaaS, did not change. The result is faster explanations, smarter root-cause suggestions, and better visibility, helping finance teams move from days of month-end work to hours.

The product feature did not change. The operating layer did.

What this means for the studio

If AI changes the operating layer, then a venture studio that does not internalize this is going to underperform.

We use AI now in three studio functions. First, in venture evaluation: a new build proposal gets a structured analysis pass before a partner spends time on it. Second, in market research: the time from we-should-look-at-this-space to here-is-the-competitive-map has compressed from weeks to hours. Third, in operational support: the studio shared services in finance, legal, and engineering increasingly use AI-assisted workflows that we could not have run at our staffing level two years ago.

None of this is a feature we ship. It is how we ship.

The companies in the portfolio that internalize this earliest are going to compound faster. The studio that internalizes it across all the companies at once gets to compound at the studio level. That is the bet.

— Pedro Hansson, Group CEO