Software / AI tools for Growth equity
For those of you who are in GE or are working with companies serving the PE/VC industry, curious to hear what tools and AI solutions you use that you enjoy or hate.
Context is were basically re-setting our stack at our fund (about a 1bn AUM with global tech sub-sector focus). Ideally I'd love a single tool that can track pipeline of potential assets, scrape web for all market updates on asset / sub segments, maybe even suggest new names coming up. Integration with salesforce (or own CRM) always helpful. None of this is technically impossible - but I don't know of a single modern tool that does it all.
WWould appreciate any insights!
Based on the most helpful WSO content, here are some insights and tools that might align with your needs for Growth Equity (GE) and PE/VC operations:
Pipeline Management & CRM Integration:
Market Updates & Asset Tracking:
AI-Driven Insights:
Deal Tracking & Document Management:
Financial Analysis & Market Data:
Emerging Opportunities:
While no single tool currently meets all your requirements, combining the above solutions and leveraging integration platforms like Zapier could help create a more cohesive stack.
Sources: Knowledge Sharing: Corporate Development / M&A, What kind of tools / apps do you wish existed in the industry?, Clarity on the Growth Equity Landscape, Is this a stupid idea? Leaving PE?, Q&A: AI will automate many roles in the IB/PE world. A live Q&A with Arctic, who are recruiting finance professionals to help manage that change
Not saying you should do this but it’s been done before:
Invest in an infra start up that powers other high growth companies and ask for monthly updates of their fastest growing customers to help you source your next deal. Scraping websites and pulling crunch base data isn’t differentiated, using your portcos’ private data is.
Haha that's an interesting take, but honestly seems like a great way to become a pariah in my industry.
We're in a sub-sector (think healthtech, legaltech, cyber, edtech, infratech, cloud etc.). It's a small world, and if one funds portcos was providing them customer data, they'd be blacklisted before the day was over.
I'm not too worried about access (we have a strong reputation and relationships) or even a differentiated source of new assets (series B+ for high growth companies are competetive). It's mostly about trying to reduce the admin headache of tracking it all.
Best I've found so far are affinity and grata. Will demo them and see if they're worth it!
You wouldn’t have to share their data just their spend, this would be totally normal information to share with an investor.
Yes you're right, but spend of a sample of companies is not an effective indicator of overall company trajectory (business model, tech stack, burn management skills etc all are strong biasing factors).
Either way, sourcing at minority growth equity stage is not difficult. Access and effective due diligence is.
I'm trying a couple of tools to see which best fits. Lots of players here -so suspect whatever we try, we'll have to migrate in a years time.
You can do a lot with Claude web -- our team tracks growth startups using it and we find that it's useful for documents, staying up to date. But you do hit the nail on the head when you say they're hard to keep updated and current tools fall short when it comes to integrations.
So what our team has done is actually signed up to a few AI tools done by startups (like from YC batch and so on) because they're developing some cool stuff. Happy to share a list of AI tools that have been useful for our team.
Yes please would be great to hear what tools you're using. We of course use an LLM chatbot, but it's obviously not built for this and not great from a team perspective.
Highly recommend using Clay.
You can use Clay to track targets, enrich them with AI search, and then set triggers to automatically add high-relevance targets Salesforce (via Make.com). You can also grab the founder/CEO contact details. Finally, it can also save costs on other subscriptions (ie crunchbase) as you can use custom APIs via RapidAPI's marketplace to scrape specific data you want for enrichment (ie funding).
Happy to share more on how to set it up. PM for details.
Would love to learn more abt this approach - looking for something new at our fund
What type of tools are you looking for?
Just sent a PM with more details
Super interesting - I looked at Clay as well but seemed like it required a lot of set up. Useful to hear how you guys used it
Sent a PM
Any other tool outside clay?
You can set this up in Airtable as well combined with Make.com. If you have a list of targets you want to follow, you can set up an automated workflow that 1) automatically scrapes updates via RSS feed and 2) dynamically searches the web for each company based on what you’re looking for. A simple AI workflow can then analyze the results and update your Airtable database per target.
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