The venture capital industry has always prided itself on pattern recognition and conviction. But as portfolios grow larger and markets move faster, intuition alone isn’t enough. That’s the thesis behind Vestberry — a portfolio management platform that has spent nearly eight years building the data infrastructure European VCs didn’t know they needed.
At 0100 Europe 2026, we caught up with Marek Zamečník, co-CEO of Vestberry, to understand what nearly a decade of proprietary data from over 8,000 portfolio companies actually reveals — and where portfolio management software is heading next.
The Moat Is in the Data
Zamečník is candid about where the competitive landscape is heading: the software layer will commoditize. “We built a functional mobile app in 24 hours at our internal hackathon,” he said. “That would normally sit somewhere in the roadmap.” The implication is clear — the interface is no longer the differentiator. The data is.
What sets Vestberry apart is the quality and depth of the information they’ve accumulated. Unlike platforms that rely on self-reported or unverified submissions, Vestberry’s data comes from the reporting layer — audited and structured. That means GPs on the platform don’t just get dashboards; they get a statistically grounded benchmark for what “good” looks like across sectors, geographies, and growth stages in real time.
Risk Management Meets Opportunity Cost
For Zamečník, the real value of data in VC plays out in two directions. The first is risk management: identifying early warning signals — changes in headcount, shifts in financial metrics, market intelligence — before a portfolio company hits a wall. The second, and arguably more powerful, is opportunity cost.
“You have large portfolios, and you can only dedicate time to certain companies,” he explained. “The data can help you understand which companies to double down on — where to really put your effort.” In a world where a single well-timed hire or growth push can dramatically move a company’s valuation, knowing where to focus is itself a form of alpha.
The Three-Tier Framework for Data-Driven VCs
Vestberry’s product philosophy is built around what Zamečník calls a three-tier framework. The foundation is a single source of truth — a centralised system aggregating monthly KPIs, cap tables, transactions, and market signals for every portfolio company. On top of that sits the intelligence layer: automated signals for risk and value creation opportunities. And the third layer, currently in development, is agentic workflows — autonomous AI agents that don’t just surface insights but act on them.
“If a company needs help with hiring, there could be an agent doing that job,” Zamečník described. “We call it the AI watchdog — as data comes in, it notifies you what happened, on an autonomous basis.”
Data-Driven Doesn’t Mean Human-Free
Despite the platform’s technological ambition, Zamečník is measured about what data can and can’t replace. “I don’t think it’s going to be 100% data-driven or that AI will make the final decision,” he said. “There’s still going to be a human in the loop. But if you can combine your intuition — compounded through experience — with data that backs it or challenges it, that’s the real overlap.”
It’s a philosophy that positions Vestberry not as a replacement for the GP’s judgment, but as the layer that makes that judgment sharper, faster, and better informed.
With their newly published white paper on data-driven value creation and an eighth year of operations underway, Vestberry is making a quiet but significant case: in a cycle where exits are slow, and portfolio management spans seven to ten years, the funds that build better data infrastructure today will have a structural edge tomorrow.
