TechTree Digest: Networking & Data Insights for Investors [Edition 1]

Welcome to edition 1 of TechTree’s TechTree Digest: Networking & Data Insights for Investors.

In each edition, we will deliver:

1. Insights from our ongoing user research

2. Product updates (today it’s mostly about this)

3. Update to roadmap

4. Industry insights 

TechTree is helping to create their private "LinkedIn-like" experience, by enabling easy access to:

1. Always up-to-date info about people, companies and investors (LinkedIn, Crunchbase, Dealroom and more)

2. Functionality to find relevant entities (search, filters, AI search, AI chat, alerts & signals)

3. Tracking connections & their strength between the people you're targeting and your network)

Our initial focus is on "high-value" relationships & connections:

1. Funding (identifying great companies to invest in & right investors for founders)

2. Enterprise sales (identifying buyers & providing intelligence)

3. Top-level hiring (identifying the right talent & providing intelligence) 

Since December our focus has been on the Platform / Portfolio support function in the PE/VC space. In 3 months, we’ve conducted in-depth interviews with 148 VC industry experts. The following challenges have resonated strongly with your peers (incl. Balderton Capital, SpeedInvest, Partech, LocalGlobe, SignalFire, GV, Crane Venture Partner):

• People/Org Tracking: Monitor key individuals or organisations vital to a VC, including founders, companies, talent, experts, etc. 

• Network Fragmentation: Centralizing network contacts into a single, reliable source of truth.

• Network Searchability: Finding individuals within their network with ease.

• Data Freshness: Ensure the currency and accuracy of contact information is up-to-date

• List Building: Simplify creating and sharing lists for enhanced collaboration.

Building upon these insights, I'm excited to introduce our latest offering, designed explicitly to address these pain points and elevate founder support capabilities:

TechTree's Value Proposition:

Build a private “LinkedIn-like” experience for your network. 

Our software enables you to:

• Have all your network in 1 place: All contacts from CRM, ATS as well as LinkedIn Connections of your employees on one database

• Automated enrichment: all connections from your network have an up to date information from LinkedIn, Crunchbase & more

• Track your targets: track companies you’re looking to invest in, decision makers you want your portfolio to access or top talent that is critical for your portfolio. Get signals 

• Connectivity tracking: see how you're connected to people and organizations you’re tracking

• Share your network: or parts of it with your portfolio and other stakeholders

• Find the right people easily: your network and all content about it is hosted on a modern vector database, so you can easily harness the power of AI to find anyone you’re looking for and get AI-created summaries and reports that speed up your process.

We have recently launched a Product Development Partner Programme click here for more info. TLDR: we’re keen to work with organizations for whom our solution is solving their key problems. We offer:

• Early access to our features

• Regular feedback sessions

• Hands-on support in set up

• Discounted pricing (including an unlimited amount of seats)

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Product Roadmap

1. Data connectivity:

   • API integration with CRM (Salesforce and Affinity)

   • Chrome extension helps to upload search results from Linkedin as well as your first-degree connections

2. AI-powered features to find the right entities

   • Similarity search

   • Chat interface

   • Automated report/summary generation about a given entity (person, company)

3. Uploading of additional data points such as:

   • own tagging system

   • notes 

4. API update

   • Enabling access to the broader set of data points via API

   • Enabling access to our AI-powered features via API

5. Company scoring based on talent quality and flows

We want to ensure our roadmap is democratised as much as possible, so please let me know if you have any other features and data points you’d be interested in (email: laurence@techtree.dev)

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ASKS

Simultaneously, we’re now focused on better understanding how investment teams use data and networks to better source & evaluate deals.  Our goal is to support the investment teams to use data and your network for better deal sourcing (20 interviews so far and growing). Some of the subjects we’re interested in are the following:

1. What elements of your deal sourcing and evaluation have been automated or super-powered by data?

2. What data sources (Crunchbase, Dealroom etc.) are you using and what are the things you like/dislike about them

3. Are you building any automations etc. based on scrapping and no / low code solutions? What are your pains in maintaining them (for example stability of LinkedIn scrapping etc.)?

4. Are you using data about founders/early employees to identify interesting investment targets/drive evaluation of companies/fundraising signals, etc.

5. Are you tracking how you’re connected to the potential investment targets?

It would be of great value for us to speak with people who are actively looking to improve their data-driven sourcing and evaluation. If you or your colleague could spend 20-30 minutes with our founders, please pick a convenient slot here.

Thank you,
TechTree Team