Why BlackWood Ventures has trusted Vestberry since Fund I.

While raising their first fund, BlackWood Ventures aimed to build a data-driven tech stack to optimize investment decisions and secure top returns for their LPs. By adopting Vestberry as their single source of truth from the beginning, they saved time on data management, reporting and gained insights to support strategic investment decisions.

About BlackWood Ventures

BlackWood Ventures, a data-driven venture capital firm based in Copenhagen, Denmark, focuses on European startups in Cleantech, Fintech, and Web 3.0. Founded and led by Bastian Larsen, a Forbes 30 Under 30 honoree and former BlackRock executive, BlackWood aims to open doors for Nordic investors to invest in top startups across Europe.

With connections to over 100 accelerators, incubators, and universities across 15+ European countries, and an Investor Club comprising over 1200 angel investors, BlackWood boasts a robust deal flow to pursue its goal. With their philosophy grounded in a data-driven approach, the fund team is building an advanced tech stack consisting of a brew of internal and external tools to support their investment journey.

Raising a data-driven fund from scratch

Having successfully raised a fund in the post-ZIRP era, when venture capital was scarce, the BlackWood Ventures team aims to find and invest the raised capital in the best start-up possible. Going the extra mile, the team integrated an AI for founder-sentiment analysis and bias minimization into their screening process to identify the best needles in the haystack.

Confident in their enhanced investment strategy the team has a goal to create a portfolio of 35 to 40 companies. To effectively manage a portfolio of that scale, BlackWood team knew they would need a proper data management solution. Drawing from his BlackRock experience, the CEO, Bastian Larsen, sought to create a secure source of all portfolio data and metrics that would fit right in Blackwood’s data-driven tech stack. Instead of chasing and remembering the most recent portfolio stats, the aim was to have the insights always at hand and accessible with just a few clicks. As building a scalable database seemed impractical, the next step for BlackWood Ventures was to find a portfolio monitoring and management tool to serve as their single source of truth. And Vestberry was the perfect fit.

From first impressions Vestberry came off as the most modern and specialized software for VC funds, offering centralization, scalability, security, reporting automation, and advanced analytics. Impressed by the solution and the sales know-how, the BlackWood Ventures team knew they had found the next addition to their tech stack.

Adopting Vestberry right at the start of the first fund helped BlackWood to:

Avoid scattered data & stay updated on the fund performance

From the start, Vestberry became the single source of truth for all portfolio data, including KPIs, investments, ownerships, and legal documentation for each deal. This eliminated the hassle of managing multiple spreadsheets or drives and gave the team easy access to dashboards with automatically calculated metrics like IRR.

Keep up with the progress of portfolio companies

The BlackWood team can request and store KPIs from their portfolio companies directly within Vestberry. Through Vestberry’s Investee Interface, they can invite and notify company founders or team members to fill out customizable KPIs at set intervals. Having this data from the start enables BlackWood to monitor their companies’ progress and provide timely support when needed.

Make smarter reinvestment decisions

If BlackWood Ventures hadn’t adopted Vestberry early, they would have lost crucial data for decision-making. Thanks to Vestberry’s powerful analytics, the team can turn data into valuable insights about their allocated capital—such as invested capital per country, stage, or industry—helping them make smarter re-investment decisions.

Create ready-to-send LP reports in minutes

Automated LP reporting saves the BlackWood team precious time, aggregating relevant KPIs and producing clean reports on each portfolio company while ensuring compliance with industry standards.  Freed from chasing data the team is able to concentrate on what matters most: driving success for our investments and making great returns for our LP’s.

Leverage their data for the next LP fundraising

Easy access to performance metrics from the first fund will be crucial for raising the second fund. The team is confident that they will be able to promptly answer any track record-related question using data stored in Vestberry.