VC firm lets AI decide $50,000 investment at ClawCon Michigan

An Ann Arbor Venture Capital firm will test a completely new way of judging which early-stage investments it should choose, by letting AI make the decisions. 

eLab Ventures is offering a $50,000 uncapped SAFE note through its “Agent-First Startup Challenge,” a pitch competition for agentic AI startups that will be judged entirely by AI at ClawCon Michigan on April 16 at the University of Michigan’s Crisler Center. Submissions are open for eligible companies who must have raised less than $1 million, have less than $1 million in ARR, and be present at the event. Founders need to submit a JSON package, a deck and a short video rather than rely on a standard pitch alone.

According to eLab’s Co-Founder and Managing Director, Doug Neal, that specific structure is partially the reason for attempting to make these decisions with AI.

“At eLab, we invest in companies pushing the boundaries of AI, but we also believe venture itself is at an inflection point,” said Neal. “The traditional pitch deck can’t keep up with the speed of innovation.” He said the challenge is designed around structured company data and AI-led evaluation, to test whether it is possible to push investing “from storytelling to signal, and from slow, manual review to real-time insight.”

As founders increasingly build AI-native companies, the argument goes that how these companies are evaluated should also become AI-native. For these reasons a pitch deck may matter less on its own, while the machine-readable ‘guts’ of a business matter more.

The investment competition is also riding the momentum of ClawCon Michigan itself. Local innovation communities are abuzz, and just a week after the University of Michigan won their first NCAA men’s basketball title in almost forty years, their home court will be playing host to one of the largest AI community events in the world.

ClawCon is for users of OpenClaw, a free and open-source software platform created just six months ago by vibe coder Peter Steinberger. OpenClaw allows users to connect autonomous workflows across supported services using different large language models, including Claude, DeepSeek and OpenAI’s ChatGPT. The platform claims 3.2 million users and 46,000 GitHub stars. 

The Michigan event already has close to 2,000 registrations, much more than recent editions held in Tokyo, Miami and New York. Neal said that wasn’t a fluke but more a sign of overlap between fast-moving AI interest and the University of Michigan’s builder culture. “OpenClaw’s rapid growth is colliding with one of the University of Michigan’s greatest strengths: entrepreneurship at scale,” he said. “With one of the world's largest undergraduate entrepreneurship programs, Michigan has a uniquely deep bench of builders already experimenting with agentic AI.”

This helps make ClawCon Michigan potentially more than just another founder event.

“This is a rare moment where students can leapfrog experience because most companies still don’t know how to actually use AI,” Neal said. “The winners won’t be the ones who just understand AI, but the ones who can apply it to get real work done.” He argues that work is shifting away from pure knowledge work and toward the orchestration of “systems of intelligence,” and that people who can manage that will become “force multipliers” inside the next generation of companies.

The University of Michigan is heavily involved in the local edition of ClawCon. With the Center for Entrepreneurship and college’s investment office liaising with the team from ClawCon to help bring it to life. Daniel Feder, Senior Managing Director of Investments at the University of Michigan, reiterated eLab’s Neal when he said that it was good to see “the local Ann Arbor and wider South East Michigan AI community come out in force for this event. It feels like a moment we’ll all remember, especially for anyone who ends up actively taking part with a demo of what they’re building.”

There are already potential ongoing benefits for the region, with the University launching The Institute for Agentic Computing in partnership with the OpenClaw Foundation. Details are set to be announced at ClawCon Michigan, but the University’s Center for Entrepreneurship (CFE) Executive Director Kurt Skifstad told us that the University believes that “playing a fundamental role in maintaining this technology as a free and open resource is the right thing for us to do. The formation of the Institute will give us the potential to assist teams across our institutions in applying Agentic AI to fundamental research, advancing Agentic AI technologies, and to discover other novel uses across a spectrum of applications. That potential and our role in it makes us really excited.”

Although there are other Midwest editions of ClawCon - and eLab’s Startup Challenge probably won’t be the last AI-judged check written for investment - the event may also signal something that founders and investors in the region will recognize. “Michigan and the Midwest are built for this moment; we don’t just invent, we operationalize, and that’s exactly what the AI era now demands,” said Neal. The next generation of builders coming out of venerable Midwest institutions like the University of Michigan could therefore have a specific advantage: applying AI to real-world work, not just building demos around it.

As indicators of where the Midwest innovation economy can lead, ClawCon, U of M’s Institute for Agentic Computing along with eLab’s AI-judges may just be pointing to a future for innovation and entrepreneurship that reveals more than the average pitch competition.

Submissions for eLab’s Agent-First Startup Challenge can be made here
Register for ClawCon Michigan here