InReach Ventures uses technology to help scale venture capital. They make investments in early stage startups throughout Europe. They built their own proprietary software and developed a new model of investing. This helps them discover and invest in the most promising startups.
There’s a few major data challenges VC’s often face. These include 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. It explains how PredictLeads company intelligence data helps InReach Ventures. This assists them in discovering new companies and tracking 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. This helps us to find startups from all over Europe. This data, along with other types, allows us to look at how companies are growing. We can see whether they’re growing their team, getting new customers, or forming new business connections. In addition, we see if they’re 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. It involves the InReach team focusing on what we’re good at. Meanwhile, we work with partners that are better than us in certain areas. This 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. However, we had never been able to prioritize it. They assist in finding news events around a particular company. Identifying company customers through logos/connections is really interesting for us. And, 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. However, how much innovation is happening in venture capital in the past 10 years is very limited. I think there is a change now. Data and software are being seen as a way for venture firms to innovate their model.
The issue that traditional VC firms first face is cultural. At their core, they are not a technology firm but a professional services organization. Where we think we have an advantage is that we started as a technology, product, and engineering organization. Thus, we take a very data-driven approach to venture capital. That’s where we think we will long term hold the advantage.
We started doing this earlier. Traditional venture capital will start to utilize data over time, but they are not tech or engineering organizations at their core. Short term, data and tech will play a broader role. This occurs as the whole industry starts using them. It’s becoming more of a buzz as data demand increases.”
What are some of the trends in Venture Capital?
“My co-founder and Investment Partner Roberto laid out 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 help us discover that a startup exists in the first place. Then it tells us whether there’s something interesting happening that we might want to talk to them about.”