How Connect Ventures adopted a new fund management strategy with Vestberry
This case study was created based on a blog post by Andrew Baldwin, Connect Ventures
About Connect Ventures
Connect Ventures is a thesis-led venture capital firm that invests in product-led companies in Europe, usually at the seed stage. Founded in 2012 in London, Connect Ventures has now invested in more than 80 startups, and its AUM is currently over €130 million. Over the last nine years, the firm has helped guide investments in product companies such as Typeform, Citymapper, Soldo, TrueLayer, Curve, Kheiron, and Second Nature.
Client’s Challenge
As with many venture capital firms, Connect Ventures used Excel as the primary tool for keeping track of all its fund and portfolio data.
Connect Ventures also used Airtable to update its portfolio KPI monitoring practices through form submissions. This process was designed to be as lightweight and painless as possible in order to maximize engagement and completion rates. However, after one year of using Airtable, this process was no longer scalable as, for example, each new analysis required the creation of a new view with a couple more columns of additional data points. “After realizing what kind of limitations Air-table had in the long run, it was time to look for another solution.”
Client identified 3 areas of improvement upon Vestberry implementation
Minimized
Time spent on inputting data into the system
Enhanced
User experience with sleek solution
Reduced
Daily fund management processes
Excel didn’t work for us, as it got more complex and convoluted with each new drawdown, investment, or distribution. The multiple worksheets and tabs became overwhelming very quickly, and we had to find a different solution. With this in mind, reviewing our key requirements and realizing what we needed was a pure portfolio management platform, we decided to go ahead with VESTBERRY.
Solution powered by Vestberry
Live metrics across all funds and portfolios. Daily and accurate FX updates as well as live TVPI, IRRs movements.
LP reporting using the data within the platform to create customizable and visually appealing reports that could be shared with LPs through a self-service portal.
Time machine reporting showing progress over time.
KPI collection allowing portfolio companies to easily update KPIs with minimal time and effort, as well as allow fund managers to track their progress and trends.
Cap table management giving one centralized place for all cap tables in a single format.
Round, Exit and Liquidity modeling, so they could use inputted liquidity preferences to run waterfalls and exit models easily.
Dedicated dashboards for each fund and each portfolio company.
Personalized views by assessment, sector, stage or geography.
Results
The process of migrating 9 years’ worth of historical investment data onto a brand new platform is never an easy task. Now it’s been completed, the day-to-day maintenance of Connect Ventures’ portfolio & fund management has drastically reduced whilst its functionality and UX have increased.
Connect Ventures now has more time to analyze its data and create insights rather than inputting data into poorly scalable databases.
“It also means that when we are asked the question ‘What’s the impact on the gross fund IRR if company X raises at a $1bn valuation?’ we can model it in 30 seconds rather than cracking open another Excel spreadsheet and crunching the numbers again,” said Andrew.
Read more client's stories
How Quantonation automated its fund processes with Vestberry. What were the main pain points? What are the main areas of improvement?
The overall experience using Vestberry, and the onboarding process itself, was very pleasant. Now we are able to get most of our financial reporting done at the click of a button.