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The team at Smart Energy Innovation Fund, the venture capital arm of Energie 360°, was dissatisfied with the efficiency of their all-in-one solution. Despite its numerous flashy features, the all-in-one solution failed to perform tasks efficiently. Data upload was clunky, many automatically calculated metrics were consolidated incorrectly, and report creation took too long. Seeking improvement, the team switched to Vestberry, a portfolio management solution that streamlined data management and reporting, saving time for more value-adding tasks.
About Energie 360° & Smart Energy Innovation Fund
Energie 360° is a Zürich-based energy and mobility service provider that makes sustainable energy available throughout Switzerland. It is 96% owned by the City of Zürich. Energie 360° contributes day after day to the implementation of the net-zero goal – here and now for future generations.
The Smart Energy Innovation Fund is the corporate venture capital arm of Energie 360°. It focuses on start-ups in cleantech, energy, smart cities, and mobility, helping them quickly establish themselves in the market and achieve sustainable growth. The fund's commitment extends beyond investments to actively supporting company founders. These founders benefit from the expertise, dedication, and extensive network of the investment committee. The experts at the Smart Energy Innovation Fund assist start-ups with all aspects of business and market development.
The Challenges of Using an All-in-One VC Tool
Before adopting Vestberry, the Smart Energy Innovation Fund team, a venture capital arm of Energie 360°, switched from spreadsheets to an all-in-one VC tool, hoping to enhance deal flow and portfolio monitoring. They found spreadsheets to be inefficient and time-consuming for managing their fund's data. The expectations for the new all-in-one tool were clear: help the team escape the maze of spreadsheets and streamline data management along with reporting.
The onboarding process for the all-in-one tool took longer than expected, with a six-month wait for the account to be ready. Once onboarded, the team quickly realized the tool was neither as efficient nor as user-friendly as they had hoped.
The all-in-one tool, promising to cover both deal flow and portfolio monitoring, had features that were either hard to use or entirely missing. Essential functions, such as transferring monthly or quarterly figures (budget and actual), were cumbersome and unintuitive. Some investment scenarios couldn't be recorded accurately, requiring workarounds that led to errors in the fund performance metrics calculations.
Instead of improving their efficiency, the team at the Smart Energy Innovation Fund found itself manually inputting each figure into the all-in-one solution, which felt like reverting to Excel. Frustrated with inefficient data management and the inability to generate reports quickly, the team began searching for a new solution once again.
The Search for a Competent Solution
After their previous experience with the all-in-one tool, the team at Smart Energy Innovation Fund decided to find a dedicated solution for portfolio management and monitoring. The new solution had to:
- Properly record different transaction scenarios and KPIs.
- Automatically calculate fund performance metrics like IRR, DPI, and TVPI.
- Have an easy and efficient data management system.
- Streamline the report creation process.
From the outset, the Vestberry team left a strong impression, showing a thorough understanding of the client's challenges and how the Vestberry product can address them. Impressed by how easy and efficient it is to create reports and import bulk data into Vestberry, the Smart Energy Innovation Fund team knew they had found their new portfolio intelligence solution.
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