For Venture Partners
Your founders should be spending the round on product.
I go into pre- and post-Series A portfolio companies as a fractional AI BizOps operator, find the work eating the founder’s week, put AI coworkers into it, and keep running them after launch. The next twelve months of runway buy product instead of coordination. The company signs and pays, and the fund pays nothing.
Uptick Systems is a Montreal AI BizOps practice run by Vaughn DiMarco. Venture funds bring me into portfolio companies that found product-market fit and are now watching the round go into headcount. Engagements start with a $5,000 audit, move to $7,000 fixed-price workflow builds, and continue as a $10,000 per month fractional seat when the company wants one.
Where the round actually goes.
The round closed, the org chart doubled, and the output did not move with it.
Your founder’s calendar is full and almost none of it is customers or product.
The monthly numbers get rebuilt by hand, so every board pack arrives a week stale.
The fix keeps arriving as another hire, and the hire takes eight months to pay for itself.
It starts when a team crosses about ten heads and the informal system that carried context across a small room stops reaching everyone. Nothing is on fire, so it runs for a few quarters before anyone prices it. For fifty years the fix was another hire, and the arithmetic that changed is set out in AI BizOps.
What they get is an operator.
Three steps, each one priced before it starts. A company can stop after any of them and keep everything built up to that point.
Find what it costs
$5,000 · 2-3 weeks
Interviews across the team, one at a time, then a ranked list of the workflows eating the most hours and a 90-day plan written for the board rather than for IT. Credited in full against whatever follows.
Build the coworkers
$7,000 · per workflow
One bounded workflow at a time, built inside the tools the company already pays for. Fixed price with operations included after launch, and the company owns the accounts and everything in them.
Stay and run it
$10,000 · per month
A seat in the leadership conversation: roadmap, hiring plan, vendor calls, board prep. I hold three of these at a time, so a founder gets an operator instead of a place in a queue.
Hours reclaimed: McKinsey Global AI Survey 2026 and Slack Workforce Index Q1 2026. The full reasoning, with the rest of the citations, sits in AI BizOps.
Workflows that move a board number.
These are the ones that come up most often in the first audit. The real list is whatever the interviews turn up, ranked by what it costs the company to keep doing it by hand.
- 01CAC
Inbound triage and routing
Every lead scored, enriched, and routed the hour it lands, with the first follow-up already drafted for the rep.
- 02Days back at close
The monthly board pack
Revenue, pipeline, and burn pulled from the source systems and assembled into the deck the board already reads.
- 03Time to value
Customer onboarding
Kickoff, data collection, and account setup run end to end, with a person pulled in only when something breaks the pattern.
- 04Gross margin
Support triage
Tickets read, classified, and either answered or escalated with context attached, so support headcount stops tracking customer count.
- 05The hire they skip
Recruiting screen
Applications read against the scorecard overnight, with a shortlist and interview notes waiting in the morning.
- 06The founder’s week
The founder’s inbox
Triage, drafts, and follow-through in the founder’s own voice, with the threads that need a human decision surfaced first.
Your portfolio already shows what coordination costs.
In August 2026 I read every open role on nine Canadian venture portfolio boards, 1,183 companies and 5,341 postings, to find out who is paying for this work today.
Read across nine Canadian portfolio boards: 27% of Series C companies and 27% of Series D companies have at least one open business-operations role. At Series A it is 6%.
One Toronto fintech is currently advertising a Chief of Staff for GTM, a Product Operations Manager and a Marketing & Growth Operations Manager. Together those three salaries clear half a million a year.
Per Gallup, for a mid-level professional. Add SHRM’s $5,475 average cost per hire before salary, and a coordination role is expensive long before it is useful.
Read that forward and it is a forecast for the company you just funded. The coordination work does not go away, it gets bought, one salary at a time, starting around Series B. Every one of those hires is a decision the company has not made yet at Series A. Installing agents into that work now is how a company reaches Series C without the payroll line.
What the fund gets out of one introduction.
Whether your platform team is two people or the partners themselves, it does not scale to forty companies at once. This is what an introduction adds to it.
Nothing on your invoice
The portfolio company signs and pays at the published rates. The fund is never invoiced, and there is no platform fee or minimum number of introductions.
A number for the board deck
Every engagement reports human leverage: strategic hours reclaimed for each hour spent running the agents, baselined before the first build. It is the same measure at every company, so you can compare across the portfolio.
The pattern travels
What works at one company gets written down and reused at the next. By the third company in a portfolio the audit runs faster and the build list is shorter, because most of the answers already exist.
A read on the operation
Two weeks inside a company’s ops shows you things a board meeting never will. You get that read, with the founder’s agreement first, every time.
What it costs, so you know before you forward anything.
Published rates, the same ones any other client pays. A company at this stage has the pain and no operations budget to redirect, so most start with the audit and one or two fixed-price builds, then take the monthly seat once the first workflow is paying for it.
- Agentic Team Audit$5,000Credited toward anything that follows
- Workflow Build & Operate$7,000 / workflowOperations included, no monthly fee
- Fractional AI Leadership$10,000 / moThree clients at a time, never more
- Monthly Advisory Retainer$2,500 / moCancel any month
- Hourly Advisory$350 / hourOne-off sessions, no minimum
Work is remote-first with on-site available in Montreal. The full rate card has the terms, and a company that decides the timing is wrong after the audit keeps the roadmap and owes nothing further.
The same work runs inside the fund.
Inbound decks scored against your thesis overnight with the reasoning attached, founder research waiting before a first meeting, data room requests tracked to close, portfolio KPIs pulled into one digest, and quarterly LP letters drafted from the numbers rather than from memory. That is a separate engagement with the fund as the client, and it has its own page.
See the fund stack →What a partner asks first.
The portfolio company. It signs the engagement and pays the invoice at the published rates. The fund is never invoiced, and there is no platform fee or minimum number of introductions. If a company decides after the audit that the timing is wrong, the roadmap is still theirs and nothing else is owed.
One introduction is the whole thing.
Pick the company where the founder is doing work three levels below their pay grade. Forward this page with a line about where their week is going, and I will take it from there. If you would rather go through the portfolio list together, twenty minutes is enough.
A Note from the Founder
I’ve been the solo technical co-founder scrambling to ship before cash runs low. I’ve also been the professional managing a practice where every hour of admin costs me billable revenue.
An agentic workforce isn’t a chatbot or a task manager. It’s the team you can’t afford to hire yet, or the COO you don’t have bandwidth to manage.
It codes, researches, operates, and qualifies, with your authority and your voice, so you show up to high-stakes moments with shipped product, not slides, and to client meetings with focus, not firefighting.
Vaughn DiMarco, CTO @ Uptick Systems