Automating Investment Workflows at Scale
Templates for Sourcing, Company Research & Portfolio Monitoring
👋 Hi, I’m Andre and welcome to my weekly newsletter, Data-driven VC. Every Tuesday, I publish “Insights” to digest the most relevant startup research & reports, and every Thursday, I publish “Essays” that cover hands-on insights about data-driven innovation & AI in VC. Follow along to understand how startup investing becomes more data-driven, why it matters, and what it means for you.
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Data-driven initiatives aim to make venture capital more efficient, effective, and inclusive. Among the three dimensions, efficiency is oftentimes the most obvious one to start with. Yet, most investors shy away from workflow automation as they’re stuck with manual routines and afraid they might lack the technical skills to get it done. Wrongfully so.
To overcome this misconception, I shared some simple no-code automations before:
“How to extract names from startup landscapes and market maps”
“Find competitors and measure their similarity with Google Sheets”
To take this format one step further, I’m incredibly excited to have Ivan, Georgiy, and David from Overdrive share some of their most powerful investment automations across sourcing, company research, and portfolio monitoring with us today. Overdrive is a results-driven automation agency that leverages AI to streamline operations, cut costs, and grow revenues.
Thank you for sharing your valuable insights with us below!
Simplifying VC Operations with AI Automation
In the VC world, where innovation is considered the key to success, it's surprising to find that many core processes still rely heavily on manual efforts. This paradox not only slows us down but also obscures potential opportunities hidden beneath tedious workflows.
This is where AI Automation comes in to help save the day. For VCs, it offers an opportunity to not only streamline operations but also uncover investment opportunities previously shadowed by the manual grind.
Overdrive has worked with multiple VC clients to help automate their tedious tasks like enriching portfolio company data, automating company research analysis, or sourcing prospecting leads.
And we’ll let you in on our (not-so-little) automation secrets.
The Manual Bottleneck: How VC Workflows Miss Tomorrow's Giants
Every VC knows the sting of missed opportunities.
Whether it’s due to the slow processing of deals, labor-intensive due diligence, or the inability to swiftly navigate expansive networks, the manual and tedious work inherent in VC processes often saps VCs of their valuable time.
In practice, this limits how many companies VCs can actually evaluate for investment, and often leads to overlooked gems and delayed decisions.
This bottleneck, in an industry where timing can be everything, might mean missing out on the next big disruptor, the giants of tomorrow.
But this is where automation comes in to save the day.
Unlocking Efficiency with VC Automation
In the high-stakes world of venture capital, automation is not about sidelining human insight, but instead focused on freeing VCs from the tedious tasks to focus on what matters.
VCs have three core critical tasks where automation can transform their workflows:
Sourcing: Discovering the next breakthrough startups requires casting a wide net. Automation streamlines this process, sifting through the digital expanse to highlight promising candidates.
Evaluation and Assessment: Making informed decisions demands thorough due diligence. Automated tools can preprocess vast amounts of data, distilling complex information into actionable insights.
Portfolio Tracking and Reporting: Keeping a pulse on invested companies ensures strategic support is given where needed.
At Overdrive, we’ve created solutions designed to elevate each of these pillars:
For Sourcing: We've developed automations for VCs built into their current workflows to automatically identify emerging startups, leveraging AI to scan through newsletters and LinkedIn, industry reports, and digital footprints for signs of tomorrow’s giants.
In Evaluation and Assessment: We’ve developed tools that help streamline company research analysis and data extraction from pitch decks, ensuring that VCs can get a quick and comprehensive understanding of each opportunity.
Portfolio Tracking and Enrichment: We offer solutions that continuously enrich and update portfolio data, helping VCs sift through the flurry of activity to learn insights that matter.
Let’s dive into a few of these data-driven Automation use cases that we’ve built for our clients.
Use Case 1: Company Sourcing in a Single Click
One of our clients faced a challenge - how do you rapidly capture data from a cool company that you stumbled upon on LinkedIn? Let’s admit it, data entry sucks!
Challenge: VC firms often expend considerable effort manually copying data from LinkedIn and other sources, which is a repetitive and time-consuming task that could be used for higher-value activities.
Solution: We created data sourcing automations that streamlined the process of capturing key company data directly from LinkedIn into the VC's watchlist or CRM.
Impact: This simple yet powerful tool helped our client save 10-15 minutes per profile, translating into hours of saved time each week for multiple people on the team.
We created an automation using Bardeen that allows VCs to save LinkedIn companies anywhere on their feed with a simple right-click. The automation will extract company profile information, find additional data sources with Apollo and save data directly into their Google Sheet system. It instantly extracts key data points from the company, employees, and funding, which drastically reduces the time spent on data entry; and provides a new dataset they were not collecting before.