Kenta Nagamine is a man of functional ambitions in the age of AI. Notably, Nagamine is driving operational excellence at a crypto venture capital fund, leveraging technological processes across the business, including its current focus: teaching machines how to think like venture capitalists. Nagamine’s ambitions may be early and experimental, but the potential payoff could be game-changing, deeply intertwined with the fast-paced and ever-evolving worlds of crypto and AI.
Nagamine works at Delphi Ventures, which is described as a “hivemind” for crypto thought leaders and founders—attracting a conglomerate of decentralized finance (DeFi) experts, blockchain infrastructure professionals, and gaming pros. As a Ventures Operations Analyst, Nagamine is part of the crew that makes complicated financial wizardry happen. Still, he isn’t just another guy who writes spreadsheets and nods knowingly in meetings. Instead, Nagamine’s ambition is to streamline the search for the next big investment—faster, smarter, and with fewer human constraints.
Nagamine’s current ambitions are a natural outgrowth of his life-long passions. For starters, he holds a degree in Applied Math and Statistics and a respectable three-plus years of experience as a data analyst in spaces like eCommerce and SaaS prior to his time at Delphi Ventures. Clearly, when it comes to the digital economy, Nagamine is a bonafide professional at crunching numbers, building dashboards, and generally making other people’s visions into a digital reality. He’s also an Osaka Global Scholar, an award given to Japanese students with big academic dreams, which allowed him to experience business at a global scale.
During his tenure at Delphi Ventures, Nagamine has been building and refining data pipelines and tools that make investment decisions less about gut feelings and more about cold, hard analytics. But Nagamine’s ambitions go beyond the present challenges and aim to the future: AI-powered venture capital.
The implications of such an AI tool are nothing short of disruptive. As an example- imagine a startup founder sends a pitch to a place like Delphi Ventures, and instead of a panel of analysts trying to make sense of a proposed venture model, TAM, or demand graph – an AI tool analyzes everything—from the pitch deck to the market data to the business plan—all faster than any human team. The time savings in processing business insights and flagging potential risks are genuinely measurable. – Such is the system Delphi Ventures is building.
This futuristic scenario is already at hand as Delphi is currently experimenting with AI tools – including creating a prototype due diligence tool that helps the Delphi Ventures team more rapidly scan and vet pitch decks.
Indeed, while still in development, Nagamine is actively refining this prototype into a component of a full-blown suite of AI-driven products that train a system to understand the firm’s internal memos, market trends, and even token unlock schedules. Basically, teaching AI models how to think like an investor—but without the bureaucracy, bloat, or inertia of human evaluators.
“This isn’t just about speeding things up, although efficiencies are an early win,” Nagamine says. “But the end goal is about changing the game entirely.” His aim is simple but audacious: a venture capital process that’s faster, smarter, more agile, and better than ever.
Nagamine’s vision is about disintermediation—removing human-driven inefficiencies and errors while leveraging data-driven processes to enhance decision-making. In the world of crypto, where trustless systems and automation are the foundations, Nagamine sees AI as the next logical step in transforming venture capital. This isn’t just about speeding things up; it’s about creating a system that complements human judgment by handling the data-intensive tasks that often bog down investors, like analyzing market trends, pitch decks, and business plans.
Nagamine is careful to emphasize that this is not a replacement for human interaction or the critical intangibles that founders bring to the table. “AI can process the numbers, flag risks, and identify patterns faster than any team ever could,” he explains. “But it’s the people behind the ideas—their vision, passion, and conviction—that ultimately drive our decisions.” His vision is not to replace human judgment but to enhance it, enabling investment teams to combine data-driven insights with the nuanced understanding that only face-to-face interactions can provide.
At the end of the day, Nagamine doesn’t see AI as simply another tool for venture capitalists. He envisions a future where these systems evolve into indispensable collaborators that inform, accelerate, and refine the investment process while respecting the importance of human oversight. This balance—data-informed conviction—for Nagamine isn’t just a theoretical ideal. It’s the foundation of a new era in venture capital, one where technology and humanity work together to shape the future.
