Meeting the demands of a growing firm
As an early entrant in the space, online research was sufficient to meet our client’s need for marketing intelligence, deal sourcing, and identifying potential partners. However, with the growing pace of activity and expansion into new markets, the firm needed a more robust solution to support investing, fundraising, and finance teams. Google was no longer good enough.
The firm also faced a crucial challenge regarding the inherent risk in impact investing, which constitutes half of its dual mandate—delivering positive financial and impact returns. Finding companies that truly create a positive impact from a solid economic base is not as easy as one might expect.
Streamlining investing and fundraising
A few members of the team had used PitchBook in previous jobs. One had a particularly positive experience with PitchBook dating back more than a decade ago. PitchBook had provided the research and data necessary to make the case for renegotiating the terms of a deal, which resulted in creating a huge win.
Given that and other positive experiences, PitchBook was the unanimous solution for streamlining the increasing responsibilities of the investing, fundraising, and finance teams.
“The data sets in PitchBook are truly impressive. I’m pulling in more than 1,000 data points of complete information. It really helps us be very agile, targeted and confident in our investing decisions.”
—Fund Controller
Key benefits in the first year included:
- Targeting made easy. Analysts use screening criteria to filter out extraneous data and drill down to the exact companies they want to explore. They’re quickly developing highly targeted lists of comparable companies, and elevating their due diligence and research.
- Deep datasets are a click away. In his work with the deals team, the financial controller is finding fund performance details and KPIs that are notoriously hard to find and benchmark, but are easily accessible on PitchBook. This is incredibly helpful in building a case for the management team.
- Fill in the gaps. PitchBook helps the team fill in any gaps in the information received from portfolio companies. Capitalization is quite structured in venture capital. Sometimes there is information that wasn’t shared until the company joined the cap table. The team can find it on PitchBook, make it presentation-ready, and build up the evolution of the cap table, so that they have a better assessment of historical performance.
- Identify co-investors. With impact investing, it’s crucial to the firm to see what other investors are investing in the process of getting to know a prospect and assessing the likelihood of its ability to scale and meet goals. With a clear picture of co-investors, PitchBook data helps build confidence in these potentially risky investments.
- Leverage value-add reports. Since foodtech is a relatively new industry, there isn’t as much public third-party coverage on trends and companies as you might find in other verticals. PitchBook tracks VC funding, foodtech, agtech, and impact investing closely, and produces regular reports (such as quarterly food tech reports) that the team finds invaluable. These reports close information gaps and provide big-picture insights into how the market is developing..
- Receive custom quarterly reports. PitchBook creates custom quarterly reports that help identify co-investment opportunities with investors that have come either before, with, or after the firm on the cap table. Tapping into PitchBook’s bench of analysts frees up about 10 hours a week for team members.
“The support we get from PitchBook’s Customer Success team is far better than any other tool I’ve worked with in the past. They’re highly knowledgeable, super responsive, and quick to resolve issues over email or Zoom.”
—Investment and Sustainability Analyst
Saving time identifying LP targets
PitchBook came onboard at a good time for the fundraising team. As the market has tightened, PitchBook helped the team get creative. It now runs regular queries to identify investors at the cross-section of foodtech, agtech, and impact investing. It is able to quickly and significantly expand the list of LP targets, identifying 1,600 potential US LPs that it had not previously approached. This would have taken several days or even weeks to do without PitchBook. PitchBook also provides complete contact information, which has created huge time savings for the team. It is optimistic about its fundraising goals.
“Now, in a matter of hours, I can identify quality targets in a new market and put together email lists, as we look to raise new funds. It’s an incredible time-saver.”
—Fundraising Director
The team is sourcing deals much faster than in the past, with a deeper degree of due diligence and detail. It estimates saving at least five, and up to 10, hours every week in comparables research. Despite a slowdown in dealmaking, the firm is able to close deals more efficiently.
“Going into the new year with this market uncertainty, we will definitely look forward to PitchBook’s quarterly reports to see if anything interesting is coming, specifically in foodtech and agtech. Those reports give us that 30,000-foot view that helps guide our work.”
—Investment and Sustainability Analyst
