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Announcing Our System Design Partnership With IOSG - AI Native Venture Capital Connecting Western Technology and Asian Finance.
Web3 fund IOSG seamlessly integrated Surf into their existing AI research agent to unlock five critical data categories—including comprehensive VC portfolios and social mindshare—through a single, agent-friendly API. This integration replaced multiple specialized subscriptions, allowing IOSG's internal AI to automatically pull and synthesize multi-faceted crypto data for highly efficient daily research.
AnnouncementJul 1, 20264 min read
How IOSG Runs Its Research Agent on Surf
"Surf earns a permanent slot in our stack. It's the only source for social mindshare ranking, perp liquidations by exchange, VC fund data, and prediction-market analytics, things the others can't provide."
— Yiping Lu, AI Lead, IOSG
IOSG is one of the most established AI-native funds in web3, with AUM of $400M, bringing Asian funds to western technology. Their research relies heavily on internal agents that pull real time data from different data sources, and as Surf's design partner they worked with Surf to integrate its intelligence into that existing AI stack, making Surf responsible for 5 major data categories for their research.
One source for five categories the rest of the stack couldn't cover
With Surf's intelligence, IOSG's agent unlocked five data types their pre-existing data stack that includes DefiLlama and Dune could not provide:
- Social mindshare ranking
- Perp liquidations by exchange
- VC fund profiles and portfolios
- Prediction-market analytics
- Fundraising rounds
Instead of stitching together 5 different data providers, Surf API gave them one gateway across all five, replacing the multiple subscriptions with different specialized data provider a team would normally have to close to cover this ground. This all-in-one-stop offer enables teams with a truly multi-faceted research experience across onchain, news, and social sentiment data.
VC and fundraising is where the data goes deepest, and it's where IOSG made a deliberate call. Weighing Surf against specialist providers like PitchBook, RootData, and CryptoRank, IOSG chose Surf as the source their analysts run on, more accurate and more cost-efficient than the alternatives.
Surf's VC fund data covers 7,799 funds, and the top 100 alone hold 12,755 fund-to-project investment relationships, all at round-level detail: for every investment you get the project, the date, whether the fund led or followed, and the raise amount.
a16z, for example, spans 193 projects across 291 rounds with 36 named team members, all kept current into 2026.
Built into the AI workflow they already had
IOSG having a strong internal AI infrastructure, Surf's AI domain specialty allowed a seamless integration into their workflow.
Surf didn't ask IOSG to migrate or rebuild. Their team plugged Surf into their existing agent through an MCP layer built by Surf that lets the agent pull from Surf directly, and the data seamlessly started working inside the system they'd already built. Most data providers can't follow Surf here. They ship dashboards and APIs built for a human to open, read, and copy out of. Surf is built to be consumed by agentic workflows, which is why nobody in its category could have collaborated in the same way.
Before working with Surf, they had built a crypto-analytics skill that acts as the agent's decision-maker: reading each research question and working out which data source it needs to pull the data from. Surf has been wired into that in-house crypto skill as a new data layer, so when a question calls for the data Surf is best at, the skill reaches for Surf at exactly that moment. Surf provided wider coverage of data; IOSG maintained the exact same agentic workflow as before.
What it looks like day to day
An analyst at IOSG sizing up a project asks the agent one question:
"what are funding rates on BTC right now, and who led the round on Berachain?"
The skill reads it as a crypto question and splits it, routing the funding rates and the investor history to Surf. The agent comes back with the funding rates, the VC's full portfolio, and the project's social mindshare, in a single pass, while their other data providers function as a cross check validation layer before output.
This kind of diligence that used to mean three separate tools and manual labor now happens in one.
Become the next design partner
This partnership is the first of a small group of design partners shaping how Surf supports research teams building on crypto data.
Surf works with teams in whatever format fits their stack, as a plain API, an MCP server, or a Skill that runs natively inside Claude Code and Cursor, with more integration paths on the way. For IOSG, that was an MCP server.
The Surf team is opening the conversation to more design partners.
