👋 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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The past few days were just mind-blowing🤯
Firstly, we ran our inaugural Data-Driven VC Summit with 29 speakers and about 600 participants across 4 days; learnings & major takeaways follow soon.
Secondly, we launched the new Data-Driven VC Landscape 2024 which got featured across Sifted and Business Insider, received hundreds of thousands of social media impressions, made top 10 Product Hunt, and brought more than 500 new subscribers to this newsletter👋🏻
Thirdly, we published our new Database Benchmarking that compares the coverage and accuracy of original startup data against its representation across Crunchbase, Pitchbook, Dealroom, CBInsights, Tracxn, Preqin, Capital IQ, and VenturExpert. It’s the most up to date and reliable way to find the right data provider for your needs.
Lastly, we launched The Lab, a community platform that unifies everything you need to run a modern investment firm in one place. We’ll be adding tons of new features in the weeks to come.
Sitting here exhausted at 3.26am burning the midnight oil, I’m really overwhelmed by your positive feedback and for me personally, it just shows we’re on the right track: Building in public, learning from peers, and making the venture capital industry more efficient, effective, and inclusive with technology - one step at a time.
In order to make the extensive DDVC Landscape more digestible, I dedicate today’s episode to a “TL;DR version of the report”, so let’s focus on the major learnings below.
Top 10 Takeaways
35% of DDVCs claim that their data-driven tools are already responsible for half of the deals sourced today.
The Median DDVC has $ 450m AUM and 40 employees, out of which 10 are investors and 2 are engineers.
Top 20 DDVCs are almost equally split across US (11) and Europe (9).
We saw annual growth in DDVC firms from 151 to 190 and in engineers across the VC industry from 767 to 865, reducing the average number of engineers per DDVC from 5.1 to 4.6 and indicating that many new firms hired their first one or two engineers within the past year. Welcome!
2/3 of DDVCs already use LLMs across Sourcing, Screening & Due Diligence, Communication & Emails, Investment Memo & Document Drafting, Reporting, and more.
Make meets buy: 80% of DDVCs prefer an internally developed core stack complemented by best-of-breed external solutions.
73% of DDVCs plan to increase their tech stack budget.
1/3 of DDVCs believes that AI allows them to cut headcount in their investment teams.
3/4 of DDVCs believe that Augmented VC will be the winning model of the future.
The biggest pain points when leveraging data & AI in VC is cutting through the noise and finding the right tools (50% of respondents) and data sources (46% of respondents). The major driver on why we’ve build VC Tool Finder and the Database Benchmarking.
I’ll keep it with this short episode for this week, to leave you enough time to dive into the full report, draw your own conclusions from the data, and share your thoughts with the community.
Stay driven,
Andre
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