There is no shortage of talented entrepreneurs who are building innovative businesses that have a positive impact on people and the planet. However, outside a few large tech hubs, most are unable to access tailored support to strengthen their strategy, challenge assumptions, and prepare for sustainable growth. In fact, eight in ten impact startups cannot access the capital (social and financial) that they need to grow.
Many of the approaches that make that support effective — peer learning, mentor feedback, and structured business analysis — are high-touch, human-centered, and difficult to extend beyond time-intensive accelerator programs.
Through a project supported by Cisco Foundation, Village Capital is exploring whether collective intelligence — combining the unique strengths of human and artificial intelligence — can scale access to quality support globally, backing more businesses focused on improving lives in their communities and beyond.
AI-enabling proven methods
To explore that question, the team focused on one of Village Capital's core methodologies: peer due diligence.
Used with thousands of entrepreneurs for over 17 years, peer due diligence helps founders examine their strategy, challenge assumptions, and strengthen their business model through structured feedback from their founder peers. It is consistently one of the most valued parts of Village Capital’s programs — and one of the hardest to scale.
Our challenge is clear: how can we preserve the value of a deeply human process while making its benefits available to far more founders each year?
Two Tracks, One Goal
The project has focused on two parallel efforts.
The first strengthened Village Capital's internal ability to evaluate and adopt AI responsibly — building team knowledge, setting safe and ethical guardrails, and providing clearer frameworks for experimentation. The second track explored the development and testing of a practical AI tool grounded in the peer due diligence methodology.
The goal in building a prototype was to test the generative AI’s potential as a memory bank and conversational learning assistant within a peer due diligence program. The prototype is being tested across programs in Europe and the US to better understand how the tool can strengthen founder support both inside and outside programs.
These early tests are providing a blueprint for how to add knowledge, data, and structured ways of examining strategy, surfacing blind spots, and strengthening business thinking, so that they’re available to any founder, regardless of whether they participate in a formal program.
A New Kind of Thought Partner
That goal led to the development of Peer 13 — named after the unofficial 13th member of a typical Village Capital cohort. The tool allows founders to ask questions against their own business information, identify operational risks, and revisit insights generated through workshops and peer feedback.
What We're Learning
Early testing has surfaced encouraging results across both tracks of the project.
Founders value a structured digital thought partner. Early users used the tool to question assumptions, identify operational risks, and refine how they think about and communicate their business strategy.
Strong evaluation criteria and domain-specific context are critical for good results. For example, Village Capital’s investment readiness assessment, co-developed with thousands of founders and investors globally, is called VIRAL, for Venture Investment Readiness & Awareness Levels. VIRAL helps entrepreneurs understand their company’s stage of maturity, identify gaps, and plan the milestones needed to unlock the right capital, at the right time. The team found that grounding AI with VIRAL and related historical data, along with pitch decks, assessments and other documents uploaded by founders, provided highly relevant insights about where the business stood on its pathway to scale and what to work on next to level up and attract capital.
Human relationships remain central. Technology can support entrepreneur development, but it should not replace the conversations, trust, and judgment that make peer learning and mentor feedback meaningful.
Responsible adoption matters, too. Alongside the founder-facing work, the project strengthened Village Capital’s internal AI capabilities through experimentation, training, and the development of practical guardrails to guide future use.
What’s Next
Village Capital is continuing to test, refine, and learn from this work through both internal experimentation and live, in-market use with founders.
The goal is not to automate entrepreneur support — it is to combine the unique strengths of people and computers to make entrepreneurial support smarter and more effective. An on-demand thought partner grounded in the collective experience and knowledge of VilCap and the wisdom of thousands of peer entrepreneurs has the potential to greatly extend the reach of strategic guidance, structured feedback, and business support to more talented and impact-focused founders everywhere.