How Pale blue dot VC achieved smarter & faster reporting with Vestberry
Imagine relying solely on Google Sheets as your data tool, only to realize it no longer scales with your growing operations. That’s exactly the roadblock the Pale blue dot team tackled together with Vestberry.
About Pale blue dot VC
Pale blue dot, a seed-stage venture capital firm based in Sweden, backs the most exciting climate tech startups across Europe & the US. It was founded by three former entrepreneurs in 2020 who wanted to build a better venture capital fund that understands entrepreneurs, and channels capital into founders solving one of the humanity’s biggest problem: climate change.
They invest in climate tech companies who want to build a world that the fund’s founders would want to live in. They invest primarily in seed & pre-seed rounds with ticket sizes between € 500k to € 1.5 million.
In their portfolio, you can find companies such as Climate X, a climate risk analytics solution; BettaF!sh, a producer of seaweed-based fish alternatives; and Overstory, an intelligence solution tracking the planet’s vegetation.
Client’s Challenge
The Pale blue dot team used to create their internal report using Google Sheets. The report consisted of over 20 different sheets that provided detailed information on fund performance and the performance of each portfolio company. However, the team found that manually inputting data and completing the report was becoming more and more time-consuming. With the expectation of a growing portfolio and additional funds in the future, the team aimed to find a smarter approach to this process.
Client's goals for successful adoption of a new portfolio intelligence solution
Eliminate manual data inputs
While ensuring the team's easy access to important information and maintaining data integrity
Keep existing design & structure
Tracking investment round details like the number of shares, price per share and valuations
Streamline internal reporting
To save time and avoid overwhelming team's capacity
Our expectation was that Vestberry would streamline the preparation of internal reports. We are very proud of our reporting and have received a lot of positive feedback from our investors. Unfortunately, it started to take more and more of our time, especially the PC pages. Vestberry becoming our main source of truth has enabled us to produce many different internal reports in hours instead of days.
The solution, powered by Vestberry
The Ultimate Single Source of Truth
In Vestberry, we’ve revolutionized the way of managing fund and portfolio performance. Say goodbye to scattered data and hello to Single Source of Truth. Vestberry offers a cutting-edge data architecture designed specifically for portfolio management needs. Our clients can rest assured knowing that their portfolio-related information is stored in a centralized hub, ensuring smart organization, maximum protection, and accessibility for every stakeholder.
Pale blue dot no longer struggles with diverse data in different formats from multiple sources. With Vestberry, we provide a robust database that captures every detail with unmatched precision. Pale blue dot data is not only well-organized, but also constantly updated in real-time. Our platform brings together the best-in-market data granularity, allowing you to consolidate and harmonize information seamlessly.
Excel Add-in
Vestberry’s Excel plugin offers an exceptional advantage to Pale blue dot by enabling real-time data retrieval directly from Vestberry to an Excel Spreadsheet. Available for both Windows and Mac, this powerful integration empowers Pale blue dot to generate fully customizable reports with remarkable efficiency. With the Excel plugin, Pale blue dot has been able to say goodbye to time-consuming tasks like manual copying and pasting of data, co-editing errors, and formula mistakes. By eliminating these challenges, Vestberry’s Excel plugin has liberated Pale blue dot’s team, allowing them to focus on more impactful activities and achieve their objectives with greater speed and accuracy.
Interactive Custom LP Report
Excel Add-in has been available to Vestberry clients since June 2022. In the fall of 2022, the Pale blue dot team asked Vestberry to recreate their report, both content & design, deploying the full capabilities of the Excel Add-in. The team received a report that looked the same as their original one but was smart & interactive. Data & information were loaded into cells directly from Vestberry. No middle-man or manual data inputs. Updating such a report for the next quarter took only a few minutes. To test the new report, the team completed the internal reporting in Q4 2022 via the original workflow and Vestberry’s smart interactive template. They compared both the process itself and the content.
Vestberry’s innovative approach streamlines our internal reporting process, saving us valuable time and resources. By automating manual tasks, we’ve been able to cut our workload by over 75% without sacrificing quality. In fact, we recently completed our annual portfolio report using Vestberry’s smart interactive template. We also received glowing feedback from our auditors during the 2022 annual audit.
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It saves us a lot of time when we collect information from our portfolio companies. Also, we like how Vestberry combines the data from multiple sources into dashboards, which we can customize according to our preferences.