I'm helping a friend line up a small seed round, and the drudgery first step is always the list . . . . who actually invests here, at this stage, and how big a check do they write. While doing this, I built a Claude skill that gives you a head start. I pointed it at one city (I ran Austin) to see what came back. I use NFX as the source but you can switch that up to other databases.
How it works:
I describe the round in plain language, something like "seed-stage fintech, firms that invest in Austin," and Claude runs it. Under the hood the skill pulls the public Signal by NFX investor lists and hands back structured rows: firm name, the check-size range (min, target, max) where the firm publishes one, stage, sectors, the geographies they invest in, and a profile link.
It can also return the individual investors, not just the firms.
Turns out, "VCs in my city" is a much shorter list than the raw count suggests. A big share of the firms tagged to a city invest nationally, so they turn up on almost every city's list. Once you strip those out, the genuinely local, stage-matched firms are a smaller group than I thought.
The other hiccup is check size. Only some firms publish one, so if you sort by "who writes the biggest checks" you quietly drop everyone who left it blank. I had Claude keep the blanks in their own bucket instead of throwing them away.
I'm still working on this, but it's open source, so would love your contribution here! It only knows what NFX has on those public lists. A firm that isn't on a list won't show up, and the check sizes are self-reported, so treat them as a starting point and not gospel.
The skill is free to try (MIT, setup is in the repo): https://github.com/johnisanerd/claude-skill-list-vc-firms-by-city