Campus To Capital
#31 Jacob Houlberg - Co-Founder of Evertrace on Data-Driven Venture Capital & the Future of Deal Sourcing
What if every VC had access to the same deals? Evertrace is building the infrastructure to make that increasingly close to reality. For episode 31 we sat down with Jacob Houlberg, Co-Founder of Evertrace, the Copenhagen-based startup helping early-stage investors detect founders and companies before they show up in traditional startup databases. Evertrace monitors signals across trade registries, GitHub, patents, research grants, domains and more to identify potentially VC-backable companies as early as possible. Today, more than 250 VC funds use the platform. But the conversation went far beyond sourcing. We talked about: > Why Jacob believes sourcing should not be a competitive advantage in VC and what happens when access to deals becomes table stakes > How Evertrace processes thousands of signals every week to find companies before they become obvious > Why company formation remains one of the strongest signals of founder intentionality > Building Evertrace with a team of just three, while acquiring and integrating multiple competitors along the way > Why fully automated VC investing is much harder than quant investing in public markets > Media, data or track record: what actually gets a fund into the best pre-seed rounds? – Why Evertrace is increasingly moving toward APIs and MCP and why Jacob would be perfectly happy if nobody used their interface in a few years > What systematically tracking stealth founders taught him after moving from investor to operator A conversation about what happens when finding companies becomes infrastructure, and VCs are forced to compete on what comes next: judgment, reputation and actually helping founders. Thanks a lot, Jacob, for joining us!
