Introducing Kepler: Inflection's Home for Research
Deep research tools for a fund that likes to do deep research.
The Kepler space telescope was NASA’s first planet-hunting mission, assigned to search a portion of the Milky Way galaxy for Earth-sized planets orbiting stars outside our solar system.
- NASA
Doing Our Homework
At Inflection, we really enjoy “getting into the weeds” of emerging ideas and industries. It’s part of our firm’s DNA, what leads to outsized returns, and what makes the job of investing interesting!
You can dive into our published research here.
An Overlooked Need
Part of our thesis around Data-Driven VC is that building the future of venture capital requires tooling across the value chain, not only in sourcing.
We’ve seen how tools such as Perplexity are fantastic for guiding research, and tools such as Notion are great for writing and collaboration, but through our experience noticed these drawbacks for investment research:
Limited Collaboration: AI research assistants like Perplexity and ChatGPT are fundamentally single-user tools. You can share links to chats you've had, but there's no way to "jump-in" and collaborate on exploring a topic together.
Fragmented Workflow: The current research process requires constant switching between multiple tools – AI assistants for initial exploration, research papers on arxiv.org for deep dives, and separate tools for synthesizing findings. This context-switching makes it harder to maintain a coherent investment thesis and wastes valuable time.
Generic Intelligence: Existing platforms are designed for general users doing broad research. Venture investing requires specialized capabilities – like mapping emerging technology landscapes, tracking shifts in market dynamics, and building deep expertise in specific domains. Getting meaningful insights from these existing tools requires careful prompt engineering or manual synthesis, which slows down the team.
We weren’t able to find an out-of-the-box tool that addresses these pain-points, so we decided to build something ourselves: Kepler.
The Kepler Platform
Mission Goals
Automate Research Generation: Streamline the process of collecting, synthesizing, and distributing research on emerging trends, enhancing the fund's ability to identify new opportunities quickly.
Enhance Proactive Research: Conduct more comprehensive research earlier in the investment process to reduce time between identification of a potential investment and making an investment decision.
Expand Pathfinder's World View: Add research on emerging industries identified in Kepler to Pathfinder (our sourcing engine) to increase the volume of high-quality information available to Pathfinder, enabling more informed assessments of companies and founders.
Key Features
Explorations
At the heart of Kepler is a chatbot experience powered by agents specialized for VC research. Unlike traditional research tools, Kepler enables true collaboration, allowing investment team members to work simultaneously within the chat interface. The platform leverages existing context from research notes, uploaded documents, scraped websites, agent memories and tools to provide richer insights. Sources are cited so the team can verify the accuracy of information in the agent’s responses.
Users can "fork" explorations to pursue new directions while maintaining the original thread, and with a single click, synthesize their explorations into structured research notes. This seamless flow from exploration to documentation keeps insights from getting lost in the research process.
Research Notes
Research Notes in Kepler combines a familiar, rich editing experience (similar to Notion) with the power of an AI assistant that has access to all of Kepler's accumulated knowledge.
This creates a fluid experience where the assistant can reference any piece of research, data, or insight the team has previously captured while helping craft new analyses.
Additional Sources
Kepler's knowledge base grows in two ways: users can directly upload documents or scrape websites themselves, and the platform automatically captures new sources during exploration. When Kepler's agents cite a source, that source is automatically added to the knowledge base – whether it's a research paper, website, or industry report.
This means the platform becomes more intelligent and context-aware with every interaction, building a rich corpus of institutional knowledge that grows both intentionally and organically through the team's research activities.
Impact
Like its namesake – NASA's space telescope that systematically hunted for habitable planets – our Kepler systematically hunts for emerging industries and trends that could power the next generation of transformative companies.
While Kepler is just two weeks into its launch, we expect three key areas of impact:
Faster iterations on research through purpose-built agents that understand our firm and investing strategy
A more aligned investment team through collaborative research experiences
Growing corpus of institutional knowledge that compounds with every interaction
Where We’re Heading
Kepler represents just the beginning of our journey to revolutionize research tools at Inflection. Our next phase of development will focus on:
Building a comprehensive knowledge graph to connect insights across our firm
Sharing our research through public-facing "Inflection Points"
Interested in learning more about Kepler or our other analytics and automation tools? Please reach out to ap@inflection.xyz.
Onwards & upwards
Team Inflection