Thank you to Mark Haaksman for appearing on our podcast series, "How AI is working, or not working, in the real world", and sharing his experience.
Mark is co-founder of Sotavento Invest, an investment fund in the Algarve, Portugal.
Watch the conversation: https://youtu.be/_Cc8WKtVFhQ
Contact Mark via www.sotaventoinvest.pt or on LinkedIn.
How Sotavento Invest uses AI to save up to two days a week
Sotavento Invest has a clear mission: local investors for local founders in the Algarve. Underneath that mission, AI has quietly become one of the team, saving the fund a day and a half to two days every week.
Meet Mark and Sotavento Invest
Mark Haaksman began investing in property in Portugal's Algarve region in 2016. He soon recognised a broader need for experienced people willing to support the region and help bring international companies to Portugal.
That work led to Sotavento Invest, a business angel investment fund focused on connecting local investors with local founders in the Algarve.
The fund assesses early-stage businesses, supports founders and introduces investment opportunities to potential investors. This involves a considerable amount of research, validation and preparation, making it a natural environment in which to test AI.
The fund has used AI heavily since 2022, starting with ChatGPT to find information for investment decisions, and later developing its own agents for three core jobs: venture scouting and market sizing, fundraising support, and evaluating how startups themselves use AI.
Saving up to two days each week
Mark estimates that AI saves the team between one and a half and two working days every week.
His co-founder uses it to accelerate venture scouting, validation and preliminary due diligence. Mark uses it to research and prepare for conversations with individual investors and investor groups.
The value comes from reducing the time spent gathering, organising and assessing information before a human makes a decision. AI does not decide whether Sotavento Invest should back a founder, but it helps the team reach the point where it can make that judgement more quickly.
AI is the tooling, and all that matters is the data.
When AI narrows the field too far
The fund's experience with its startup-scouting prompt demonstrated why AI results should never be accepted automatically. Instead of identifying a broad selection of early-stage founders, the system repeatedly returned people from one narrow demographic.
For Mark, this is part of a wider problem. He regularly sees startups trusting AI-generated research, investment narratives and product decisions without questioning the underlying information or instructions.
The lesson: AI can quietly include bias into decisions, so check the output carefully.
Mark's advice for adopting AI
- AI is the tooling, the data is what matters. There should be strong relevance between the language model behind your AI and the job you are asking it to do. A poor language model produces poor results.
- Start collecting historical data now. Startups should collect their data as strongly as possible, because future AI developments will benefit from strong models. Creating that historical record today is exactly what most startups are currently lacking.
- Do not trust AI to the max. Whatever comes out of a search or an agent still needs human judgement before it shapes a decision.
Is AI living up to the hype?
Mark's answer is an unhesitating yes. More and more people are actively using it, across his generation, university students and early startups alike. His prediction: AI becomes a de facto part of the toolset people use to do their daily jobs.
Why this story matters
Sotavento Invest is not a tech giant. It is a regional fund with a local mission, and it is already reclaiming nearly two working days a week with AI while staying alert to the traps. That combination of measurable results and caution is what real-world AI adoption looks like.
If you are a business angel, or want to become one in the south of Portugal, please reach out to Mark via www.sotaventoinvest.pt and LinkedIn.