InReach Ventures uses technology to help scale venture capital and make
investments in early stage startups throughout Europe. They built their own
proprietary software and developed a new model of investing to discover and invest in the most promising startups.
There’s a few major data challenges VC’s often face including data quality and the
time, effort and cost it takes to acquire or crawl data.
Here is a short interview with Ben Smith the Co-Founder / Partner / CTO of InReach Ventures and how PredictLeads company intelligence data helps InReach Ventures discover new companies and track growth signals for companies of interest.
How do you identify growing companies?
“InReach combines data from lots of different data sources. Some of that is around signals on how a company is performing like PredictLeads data, which helps us to find startups from all over Europe. This data, along with other types, allows us to look at how companies are growing, whether they’re growing their team, if they’re getting new customers or new business connections or partnering with different companies. “
Are there any specifics on how PredictLeads data is being used?
“With job postings in particular, outside the general idea that a company is growing positively, it gives us an idea whether there is real substance behind a company. Seeing that a company has a product and engineering DNA and are looking to invest more in it is a positive.”
What challenges were you able to overcome with PredictLeads data?
“It’s all about how best we leverage our own product and engineering resources. Having the InReach team focus on what we’re good at and working with partners that are better than us in areas is an important point of leverage.”
Why did you decide to subscribe to PredictLeads data?
“PredictLeads helped us by doing some of the work that we had always planned but never been able to prioritise. Finding news events around a particular company and identifying company customers through logos/connections is really interesting for us and also it’s something that takes significant time and effort to get right.”
What’s your view on the VC industry using data and what are the biggest challenges on the horizon in the industry?
“The value of data, machine learning and a data driven approach to capital is an ever growing trend. The point of venture capital is to fund innovation and how much innovation is happening in venture capital in the past 10 years is very limited. I think there is a change now where data and software is being seen as a way for venture firms to innovate their model. The issue that traditional VC firms first face is that culturally at their core, they are not a technology firm but a professional services organisation. Where we think we have an advantage is that we started as a technology, product and engineering organisation, taking a very data driven approach to venture capital. That’s where we think we will long term hold the advantage because we started doing this earlier. Traditional venture capital will start to utilise data over time, but at their core they are not tech or engineering organisations. Short term, data and tech will play a broader role in terms of the whole industry using it as it’s becoming more and more of a buzz and as data is becoming more demanded.”
What are some of the trends in Venture Capital?
“My co-founder and Investment Partner Roberto layed out the the data trend in VC well in his blog post: The Full Stack Venture Capitalist“
How do you see PredictLeads to help you achieve your long term goals?
“Two things PredictLeads does and will continue to do is that it helps us discover that a startup exists in the first place and then tells us whether there’s something interesting happening that we might want to talk to them about.”
