The Future of Venture Capital

If you think you can be a successful VC investor based on the old school philosophy of having a strong network, think again. The more advanced VCs these days have already started to build in-house teams of data scientists, generating high volumes of data to source attractive investment targets ahead of the competition. In order to generate top quartile returns, you will have to build your own data-driven deal sourcing methodology. At Venture IQ, we unlock the power of big data to all VCs through our platform Catalist: a customisable deal flow generation platform for VCs that want to stay ahead of the curve. It is built on the premise that the earliest bird with the best data gets the right focus and the worm.

“In order to generate top quartile returns, you will have to build your own data-driven deal sourcing methodology.”

Key platform components

‍To build a powerful data-driven deal sourcing methodology, there are three things you want: A seriously large set of companies, a process to discover high quality leads and, regardless of the solution, you want it integrated in your existing stack. This is how Catalist will help you on these three points:

Seriously large set of companies: Catalist works like a catch-all net, that continuously finds high volumes of early and late stage companies, including the ones that never hit other radar screens (like pre-seed companies and family-owned businesses). Sources where Catalist finds these targets can be VC websites, accelerators, software repositories, patent databases, press releases, RSS feeds, Twitter feeds, industry associations, comparison websites etc.
Focussed processing engine: To find quality leads, you need to be able to perform theme-specific searches and identify ‘growth potential’, based on early indicators. By consolidating company metadata from different sources into single company profiles, Catalist creates early signals of growth for you to search on. You can create a customisable set of filters to narrow down on growth indicators that matter to your theme, ranging from patent information, to customer ratings, to software development activity.
Integrated in your stack: Catalist will allow you to add data from third party data providers and even your own proprietary datasets to add more signals and richness to the company profiles. Catalist will then help you stream the companies you discovered directly to your CRM system to blend swiftly with the rest of your workflow.

Early stage investors’ chance to get in first

‍The first version of this new platform will be launched over the coming weeks and is aimed at pre-seed/early stage investors. Currently, the platform discovers recently set up software companies and enriches their profiles with information from the corresponding company websites and publicly available online sources. All companies are easily searchable on Catalist without complicated rules, just on their website text. On top of that, we make it easy to monitor your searches and quickly assess new companies with a ‘Tinder-like’ interface as they get discovered. This is going to be a huge benefit for accelerators and seed investors, as we estimate our platform to generate about 3,000 software start-ups per month.

And this is only the beginning...

‍Venture IQ will soon unlock patent data, RSS feeds, Twitter hashtags, and subsidy databases and many more. In addition, we will start integrating with established data providers to enrich your data and with popular CRM systems to manage your deal flow and pipeline. This will make Catalist a key tool for a broader audience, such as later stage investors, corporate innovation teams, R&D teams and entrepreneurs aiming to keep track of their competitive landscape.