Venture capital investors do many things: fundraising, evaluate companies for investment, provide advice to portfolio companies, identify key talent for management roles, etc. However, before any of that can happen, there is one critical step: deal sourcing.
Sourcing deals is one of the most important–and time-consuming–activities performed by venture capital firms, and it’s still one of the most challenging.
Very often, VCs have found undervalued businesses, but they are not sure how to approach the management team and how to convince them to have further communication. It is very likely that the team has had connections to some of those companies. With nevaal maps, VCs centralize all relationship networks of the whole team, so that the obvious connections are aggregated to be shown in a visualized way and don’t get lost in isolated systems. However, some of the connections are not so obvious, for example, they may be in similar industry groups, or they may be connected via common partners or inventors.
nevaal maps can be a powerful tool to uncover the indirect channels. Based on a strong graph analytics algorithm, nevaal maps display complex relationships in graph databases and also visualize all direct and indirect connections optimally in one place. Nevaal enables investors an intuitive tool to quickly visualize and analyze the relationship network of targets. Then VCs can start from a position of trust and respect instead of cold outreach to get in front of the hidden gems.
In a competitive environment, VC firms face fierce competition to win a deal when they find hidden gems.
Some VCs find the dynamics of a certain business or industry attractive, and they manage to approach the management team before their competitors. However, it is highly likely that the moment VCs contact the management team is not the right timing. Reasons varied: the business may need to make more progress, the owner might not be ready. As time goes, more VCs try to contact the same management team, and the team will easily get lost in many choices and don’t know which to choose.
In either case, VCs need to remain engaged and find ways to demonstrate the value that the target companies value the most so that they can stay top of mind with the management team when the timing for a deal is better aligned.
Start-ups choose investors with great reputations and great deal flow but also experience and resources to support portfolio companies. In many cases, they value it even more than the money.
nevaal as an ecosystem management tool helps VCs offer better support and management to portfolio companies and doing all operational activities more efficiently: key client introductions, recruiting C-level leadership, tracking the progress of the company. By using nevaal, VCs will gain a competitive advantage in being more efficient and offering greater value to startups’ needs.
