Deal flow management software for facilities

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hello and welcome everyone to our live Affinity webinar building a tech stack to create a scalable Consolidated deal flow system I'm Jenny Dvorak I'm one of our directors of product here at affinity and I'm joined today by Connor Hughes CTO at Artesian all right so today uh we'll start by providing some context on what we're seeing in our customer markets including a shifting investment landscape and including the needs and Trends in technology in use today and then I'll pass the mic over to Connor to talk about an introduction of Artesian talk about how the technol technology stack has evolved over there and talk about some Affinity use case examples and the benefits that they've received from it so what we've seen in the shifting investment landscape is that private Capital firms operate in a relationship economy but with difficult to use transactional systems this is because technology strategy has become a critical contributor to the success of private Capital firms and in a relationship-driven economy like this the most successful firms have moved away from the Legacy transactional systems that are just unable to give them a Competitive Edge that they need so private deal Dynamics have changed and this has dramatically impacted investment firms so the levels of competition will continue to increase which puts even more emphasis on investors networks and the technology that allows them to tap into those networks at scale and because of this data and systems in the daily experience of these deal makers has to change today the industry is plagued by low adoption of existing crms as investors continue to settle back into siled Excel docs to manage key workflows and relationships and who can blame them when most crms require so much manual data entry and not enough flexibility to view information in a way that is helpful and also actionable but some of the leading private Capital teams like Artesian have found a way to leverage affinity and other supporting Technologies to drive better investment decisions and by putting Affinity at the center of your Tech stack you can free your team from manual data entry and allow them to collaborate effectively and leverage those relationship insights to close more deals so how does Affinity do this Affinity syncs with your email and calendar data which then automatically builds contact profiles and then enriches them with leading data providers to provide precise relationship graphs and the insights needed to make investment decisions it's available wherever you work within an easy to use flexible web application also available within your email inbox on mobile on LinkedIn and other key websites in your browser it brings information to you wherever and whenever you need it including other tools you use for internally and externally facing operations so with that I'm going to pass it over to Connor thanks Jenny um so as the slide says I'm the CTO of Artesian I've got a number of different responsibilities um I look after internal systems plus also doing diligence on inbound portfolio companies and also acting as an advisor for for portfolio companies um I've implemented a number of crms over the years and yeah Infinity's been one of the more seamless processes that I've uh that I've stood up so all good that's why I'm here today um next slide thanks so our teaching is um one of the largest early stage uh VCS in the southern hemisphere but over uh bill under management and 600 portfolio companies we're a global footprint which is challenging um you know given that there are different people touching different companies at different times of the day and um we'll as we'll come to to uh to later in the presentation um the information sharing capability and kanban boards are really useful um to bridge those multiple time zones um so I think there's a realization within Artesia and it costs a lot of other firms that you will hit a hit a Tipping Point or a precipice where um you know your your manual processes that are Hotel based or um you know just in people's heads just on scale um and you know maybe that's at the 500 mil Mark maybe that's a billion maybe that's your third fourth or tenth fund but at some stage things just don't scale and you can't keep adding more people so um you know there's a recognition that's there needed to be a digital transformation um to systemize an order base um key pieces of the investment process um and also to be able to um you know to have that confidence to be able to collaborate and to have that information sharing capability across the uh across the team to remove those information silos and to you know to ensure that there is transparency across the investment process um so somewhat surprisingly when I I joined um Artesian you know there were a lot of manual processes and given that BC's invest into cutting-edge Technologies but uh you know it was an opportunity to uplift and to end man pass to breed capabilities um like um affinity and data warehousing and business intelligence reporting um and to be able to um you know automate interfaces with external parties whether they be LPS or startups um to be able to pull those relationships in seamlessly um into affinity and then to be able to work through the investment process and then to be able to um interview with financial systems and then make an investment and then manage that relationship on an ongoing basis or if an investment if a deal is passed to be able to then go back and um to have another conversation in 6 12 18 months time um with a uh with a potential Investment Company so the tech stack of 450 as I said it was um pretty Greenfield um there was Trello there was Excel and there was a lot of email interaction so one of the the VC team um famously um famously observed that her her inbox was her her workflow system so um that was you know definitely right for for disruption and improvements and it's something that um was a big uplift from standing up Affinity so we look at the workflow um a startup came through either a warm introduction um or via scouting um it uploaded into Trello manually and there was duplication there was manual and lookups to pitch book for um for data on the particular company um then going through the OC process um different Trello boards and then there was no integration with B funds for financial reporting and it was all um siled segregated and difficult to um onboard people with um difficult to provide the transparency of reporting that LP is now demand whether it be class young Investments or across CSG um importantly so yeah big uh big opportunity um so as I mentioned yeah I said the data and the technology around data was recognized as a it could be a potential competitive Advantage for the firm um and we articulated those competitive advantages and how we wanted to execute it um so step one was to get core building blocks in place so stand up Affinity stand up without a warehouse um and to then pull those building blocks together um to integrate um a proper front door mechanism type form integrates through to Affinity so that allows us to be able to to filter and to Route the and the status to the appropriate fund um and to be able to um do you know things for example like for our female lead families funds to be able to score gender diversity um so from the left we've got startups coming in goes into uh into Affinity also Affinity is then just based mining our relationships with any external parties so we know if um start of ABC Corp um well we can say that you know oh John or Mary or Tom has talked to ABC Corp because we've got that relationship um mapping already in Affinity so there was no need for anybody to update any case or records it's just there um so looking at the flow we've got a type form into affinity and fires off a team's message but a new um uh a new company has submitted the type form um the pitch deck or video is saved onto SharePoint um the company information is enriched via pitch book automatically um fires off via API to our data warehouse and we pull financial information from ephrons and then um and the third step of the three phases build a unifying um data pitch on top of that via business intelligence report in that context it's power bi um and then um the the next stage um it's been forecast by Gartner and by others that in the next five years of 75 of VC deals will be um machine learning influenced if not driven um so given the data's there we can then do um machine learning to be able to provide an investability score um something else we're looking at is also to be able to um to Source based on mandates and to be able to Source potential Investments um across across different geographies on a 24x7 basis um you can always just rely on people or your network sourcing um sourcing potential Investments and this is really another um another view of our Tech stack um so we've got our rlps the contributed funds so pretty much well understood um but Affinity is um is integral to the actor entire process so we've got the deal pipeline touching Infinity um portfolio monitoring of the power bi and then as I mentioned earlier we come down through to um to machine learning um and we've got the um the back office and admin um aspect as well which is all interrelated and tied into um to to Affinity um so it's not just about technology it's also about people so people need to Value data and um the team needs to Value data again one of the real positives I found about Affinity is that you don't need to input the data and so when I've had CRM implementations in previous organizations I've had you know resistance from people because they've got to go and create a contact or create a case or do something and when it happens automatically for you when the affinity's AI does it for you pulls out the information from your your mail clients and life is good and you get that data and you can then um start to to do interesting things with you know to move um companies through workflows and to build Integrations as I mentioned with um you know with like teams or slack um or type form um and here's a video of just a flavor of um of how Artesian uses um dfloat so we get a portfolio in from the outside world whether it comes through from an introduction or from a from type form it's um it's triaged by the analysts and then it gets worked through various statuses so um you know whether it's rejected straight out of hand if it doesn't mean a mandate um or if there's a um if there's further DD required um we work through and you can see in the um in that screenshot that's across the screen that you know there's um additional information that's been enriched um the the green information um and we have various different labels and tags which then allow us to work through as the potential investment goes through different Gates um through investment committee and then through funding that um it will then work his way through and funds will be released and a um it'll be recorded that we've made an investment and then we can come back to this for a follow-on Investments so we've understood that um now the information is there that we've made a an investment and there were people um who can um come back and ask you know if they're asking a question when do we invest in this company this is easily accessible and we can report on that um either through uh through Affinity reporting or expose it through into um Power bi onto business dashboards yeah so you know really as I've as I mentioned um affinity's helpless and scale up and spread out um do more with less I guess is also important so it reduces the need to hire additional back office staff um it becomes you know selflessly become more efficient um to reduce the amount of data that lives in people's inboxes that siled um one of the um the BC team was reluctant to take holidays because he wasn't able to hand off um his deals to team members because all the information all his nodes were either um in his email client or written down in a notebook now all that information is on a um it's on an affinity deal so you can see the the contacts the context and somebody else can pick up and move a deal forward if uh should there need to be a uh anything worked on whilst somebody's on leave or out of the office um and you know the the real real benefit is that it's um it's increased in Deer Flow It's Made would you reduce frictions and made things um better and one thing's one of the things I I strive to do is to uh make things better and to improve the lives of the business teams that I work with um and that's where we're at today great thanks thank you all right thank you so much Connor for joining us today um and walking us through the examples of affinity within your text Tech great thank you enjoy