The system is broken! Every day, entrepreneurs submit tens of thousands of daily requests for investments, partnerships, and other critical resources. Organizations such as VC firms, corporations, banks, angel groups, insurance companies, government agencies, and even universities lack the technical infrastructure required to effectively evaluate and communicate with these early-stage companies at scale. To date, these investor pain points have yet to be resolved in any significant way.
Understanding VC & Investor Pain Points
The current process of engagement and evaluation in the industry is fragmented, costly, and manual. Organizations are now more than ever, forced to manage an incredibly high volume of requests and unstructured company data in order to make decisions. As a result, the industry is suffering from human errors, bias, limited options, and visibility, making it impossible to review all deals and stunting global innovation.
Let’s say I’m an investor at a VC…my job is to find deals that match our fund’s thesis. This involves hours of sifting through warm intro emails, LinkedIn, and other platforms…ugh! Once I finally shortlist a few companies that I’m interested in, I then have to reach out to schedule meetings through one of many channels. Once in a meeting, I have to digest as much information about the company as possible from what the founders have said, ask clarifying questions, end the call, and then wait for a response to any questions the founders need more time to answer. This includes follow-up in the form of documents, sales collateral, projections, etc. The final step is standardizing the results of my analysis to come up with my final decision. I don’t know about you, but this process sounds exhausting.
Peachscore has solved these problems by introducing a new universal protocol that intelligently uses data to help investors assist and assess startups at scale. Augmenting a social approach with science to shorten the list of pain points that the industry is facing on a daily basis.
Common VC Pain Points:
1. Time and Cost of Pre-Screening. The amount of time it takes a VC or Investor to effectively review one deal can be anywhere from weeks to months. The time spent pre-screening and performing due diligence means time not spent finding new investment opportunities. It costs a lot of money to scout deals and does pre-screening on them. It’s becoming too difficult to process manually with current methods.
How Peachscore helps: Peachscore is a new way to easily view, understand, and analyze a startup company’s DNA. Get quantitative and qualitative metrics, KPIs, and data points across 14 different dimensions including founders, team members, product, financials, competitive landscape, and market opportunity. The platform provides directional reports and scoring methods of a startup’s information (similar to the invention of credit scores) and can even automatically verify data listed on the company profile.
2. Volume of Deal Flow and Reach. The explosion of new startups entering the ecosystem due to the lowering costs of spinning up a business, Web3, and other macro factors has drastically increased the volume of companies investors currently have in their pipeline. It’s just too many for them to process effectively and this trend will continue to accelerate. Additionally, for the first time ever, the number of unicorns outside of the United States passed 30%. This tactic shift caused investors to allocate more resources and budgets to scout cross-border deals. This means more challenges, dealing with more complicated pipelines, and dealing with scalability issues on a global scale. Funds are expanding their reach and need to increase the size of their funnel.
How Peachscore helps: Peachscore’s engine enables organizations to assess all companies in their funnel via the bulk invite feature. No stone goes unturned, and Peachscore will help organizations stay lean as they scale their reach. With Peachscore’s Pulse feature, organizations can now discover new companies outside their network from all different regions around the globe.
3. Unstructured and Inconsistent Data. There currently is no standardized data delivery system in place to ensure true cross-comparability between companies can be made. Investors are forced to manually extract data from various channels and formats to come up with a conclusion. The pandemic has drastically increased digital engagement, which means more investment-relevant information is now digitally native and needs to be considered and assessed in a streamlined manner.
How Peachscore helps: Peachscore standardizes information collection and delivery. By doing this, automation can be introduced to save time, money, and energy and get rid of the mundane data collection and reformatting process required for decision making. Peachscore’s data of tens of thousands of early-stage companies show that the data quality improves by 59% compared to any other solutions on the market. Better data means intelligence and automation which can extract anomalies and patterns on early-stage companies. As the global pandemic changed the way investors engage with startups, Peachscore will help this adoption, simplifying the process for founders to provide consistent, accurate information.
4. Bias. People are inherently biased and Venture Capitalists are highly susceptible to it. To be fair, in many cases, these biases are not always intentional. For example, if a venture capitalist is for whatever reason having an off day, a startup may not be reviewed patiently or to its full potential. As a result there is a chance that both sides end up hurt; losing a great investment opportunity, wrong capital allocation while cutting resources from a qualified startup. There is a need for human bias to be counterbalanced by data to ensure objective decisions are being made.
How Peachscore helps: Peachscore serves as a data-driven lens that can counteract any inherent human biases that impact decisions. Incorporating a human and data-driven approach will naturally counteract bias thus driving more equitable investment decisions. The Peachscore AI is able to review all deals to make necessary annotations and extract key spotlight points.
5. Risk Assessment Dilemma. There has been a massive influx of retail investors into the ecosystem due to crowdfunding platforms. These are in many cases inexperienced investors placing very high-risk bets on early-stage businesses. Unfortunately, 8/10 of retail investors lose their money on crowdfunding platforms.
How Peachscore helps: Peachscore acts as a risk rating system with a goal to help educate and protect retail investors from losing their money.
By 2025, more than 75% of venture capital and early-stage investor executive reviews will be informed using artificial intelligence and data analytics, according to Gartner, Inc.
Peachscore is at the forefront, offering a completely new and optimized experience that leverages data and analytics to improve engagement and communication for the entire early-stage venture market.