Data Driven Private Investing- ForesightData

This post is sponsored by Foresight Data- Everything for data-driven private markets.

Data is playing a bigger role in distinguishing investors and ops teams in the private market. It seems every private fund manager, regardless of stage, has some sort of data initiative. Vertical CRMs brought the first wave of data innovation for venture and PE firms, Affinity in particular. But no CRM unifies the increasing volume and variety of third-party data, documents in shared drives, cap table data, and fund accounting data into a single source of truth about companies, funds, and portfolios, while also giving you the modeling and workflow tools you are looking for. Enter ForesightData.

 Data-driven sourcing and diligence

In my previous roles before focusing on seed stage investing at Social Leverage, we did a lot more late-stage and public markets investing. We were always leveraging data for not only sourcing investments but for researching competitors, diligence, and tracking our portfolio companies. Data was part of our ethos. Alternative data, traditional data, proprietary data- we used it all.

Foresight’s sourcing product unifies third-party company data (think Specter, Harmonic, Github, etc) using LLMs to give you a dashboard with both subscription and publicly available data alongside the relationship data from your CRM so that you have a single view of a prospective investment. Their pipeline product lets you move prospects into a diligence workflow that carries over all that data and integrates firm notes and docs.

Beyond portfolio reporting: portfolio management

Excel is used everywhere, but it would be great to have every bit of performance, ownership, and fund accounting data built into dashboards and scenario modeling tools so that everyone has instant answers to all their questions. That’s what Foresight’s Portfolio module does.

Unlike KPI collection point tools which don’t integrate cap table or GL data, Foresight’s portfolio management software gives the deal team the ability to analyze and model their own book of business and finance and ops the ability to do granular GP and LP reporting. These features allow teams to be more strategic about recommending exit scenarios to drive IRR and tracking fees, contributions, and distributions in real-time.

The full platform

I first met the team at Foresight Data a few years ago and it instantly made sense to me. It was something I wanted to build or have access to in my old roles, but it would never make sense for a single firm to build something this robust in-house.

Foresight Data has built everything you need in one place. Integrating all of your pre- and post-investment data seamlessly into your team's workflow so that everyone is working with the same version of the truth. Founded by Jason Miller and Adam Devine and built by a team that worked with Jason while at BlackRock, Point72, and Greycroft, the team combined have been on the investing side of the house and have experience selling B2B software. There are very few people who have the experience of building data-driven platforms for the private market at scale and to see Foresight come to market right when everyone is asking for something like this is exciting.

Whether you are in VC or PE, the platform is worth seeing a demo. The technology is purpose-built to eliminate the need for ETL, API’s, and SQL, delivering hassle-free insights to drive investment decisions. They have also created real-time integrations to fund accounting data at the cash flow level and pairing it with cap table data gives users a way to analyze ownership in a very granular way. Combining this with scenario modeling tools that allow you to run valuable analysis.

When you are investing in private markets, being efficient on managing your deal flow, where you are in the investment diligence process and being able to quickly get up to speed on a company is key to being successful in this data driven world. Seeing how ForesightData has put this all together is impressive. One of the features I really like is the quick tear sheets you can create. With a click of a button you can create a tear sheet, save to pdf or easily print so you can read on the subway or share with a colleague.

For those thinking about how to level up your investment process, I’d recommend checking out a demo of the ForesightData platform.