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.
VIDEO: Showcase workflow to save any company from LinkedIn to Google Sheet and enrich with additional company info👇
For the followers of this newsletter, we’ve prepared a gift. We’ve templatized this automation, which you can get here, and included a tutorial to get it running for your team in less than 5 minutes. All you need is a Bardeen and an Apollo API key.
Some clients have even taken this further to build internal company CRMs upon the data they are collecting. Here's a webinar with Bardeen and Softr that will walk you through this opportunity.
Use Case 2: Creating Company Research in Seconds from a Website
For any VC firm, company research takes up lots of time. They gather websites of their favorite startups, yet sourcing the rest of the information necessary to get it into a CRM is a time-consuming struggle.
What if we could get it done in seconds with a single click?
Challenge: Company research is a very time-consuming but crucial task for any VC firm to understand the investment prospects that are coming in.
Solution: We’ve created human-in-the-loop automation for our clients to help them quickly conduct company research analysis based on a company’s website. The automation automatically scrapes and summarizes data from multiple common sources, like LinkedIn, Apollo, and Crunchbase; and aggregates it into a spreadsheet. Then, it uses that source data to generate a detailed company report in Google Docs with the help of AI-reporting-agents, and
Impact: This automation started as a quick win; and became an asset for the client’s team to generate automatic pre-populated company research reports, ready to be shared with stakeholders.
VIDEO: Showcase workflow to save company website URL, conduct comprehensive company research and create memo👇
Use Case 3: Enriching Portfolio Companies and Keeping Them Updated
Is keeping track of your portfolio companies a headache? We’ve got you covered here too.
Challenge: Maintaining up-to-date records and insights on portfolio companies can be daunting, especially as they grow and evolve.
Solution: We transformed our client’s process of updating portfolio company data by automating the enrichment of company information using web scraping and AI analysis. This system automatically updates records with the latest updates from their website, LinkedIn information, and news mentions.
Demo Insight: Utilizing tools like Bardeen for scraping and integrating AI Agents, we set up a workflow to scrape their portfolio companies, enrich them and update the venture's database with fresh information.
Impact: This automation helped our client always keep an eye on the latest updates in their portfolio, as well as sourcing data from other portfolio websites, saving many hours of tedious work.
The coolest part is this doesn’t only apply to their portfolio; but can be run for any portfolio website they want to target.
VIDEO: Showcase workflow to enrich and monitor portfolio companies👇
These examples show automations of different scales, which tie together tools like LinkedIn, Crunchbase, Relevance, Bardeen, Apollo, Google Sheets, and CRMs to automate frequent time-consuming processes.
It also shows how data-driven initiatives are not always these big and robust processes. If we’ve learned something from 4+ years in the automation and no-code space is that sometimes the simplest automations are the ones that can generate the biggest transformation in efficiency and time saved.
We don’t shy away from bigger implementations (like AI Agents, custom ChatBots, or founder tracking at scale); but we’ve come to realize the starting point for VCs is more often on the small wins that can get them to change and reap the benefits from automation faster. These wins build up a culture of efficiency and curiosity; which sooner than later creates confidence in the team to dive into the “big ideas”.
In a Nutshell
The more we help VCs, the more we learn that often the small efficiency improvements and the right tools make the biggest impact to help them move faster.
These few samples can already help your firm save many valuable hours. And every hour saved from the tedious manual tasks is an hour toward discovering and nurturing the next unicorn.
If you like these teasers, we'll be speaking at the virtual Data-Driven VC Summit 2024 5-8th May where we’ll share detailed step-by-step guides and hands-on automation examples that you can take and implement immediately.
If you can’t wait until the conference and would like us to automate your workflows, let’s jump on a call to see what we can do for you.
This is it for today. I hope you enjoyed this hands-on guest post and got some inspiration to start pushing the boundaries of efficiency. It’s oftentimes the small things that have a big impact. Don’t wait, just start.
Stay driven,
Andre
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The bottleneck in the VC industry is it's general lack of s forward-looking, data-driven approach to understanding where innovation occurs and using it to vet-out stupid ideas. As a result the scale they need to manage is a smokescreen masking this lack of capability that requires an abundance of bad bets just to find a good one. They are s reflection of success rates in general.
Agree? If not, I have some data for you.