Enriched, auto-captured data speeds decision-making at Founders Intelligence

Introduction

Founded in 2013, and headquartered in London, U.K., Founders Intelligence’s team of former start-up founders and strategy experts combine their entrepreneurial experience and commercial expertise with deep relationships with the technology start-up ecosystem. Leveraging this combination, Founders Intelligence has a track record of setting strategies and delivering growth for FTSE 100 companies and other global organizations. 

To stay competitive, the team at Founders Intelligence needed a way to compile, gather insights, and build data sets around its target list of companies. However, the team was spending too much time on manual prospecting, data entry and management. Founders Intelligence turned to Affinity to quickly provide the automation and relationship intelligence needed to build hyper-targeted lists with actionable insights to make their conversations even more compelling.

Challenge

Building the perfect shortlist—a hyper-targeted list of companies that might meet a client’s needs—is a key differentiator for firms like Founders Intelligence, which needed an efficient way to assemble those lists, convey their insights to clients, and build their valuable intellectual property into a proprietary database.

Gathering a comprehensive list of prospective companies that meet all the right criteria is a group effort among the project team; the final list is shared within the firm to begin outreach.

“We regularly review a large number of organizations,” says Sebastian de Lange Kofoed, a strategy consultant on the Founders Intelligence team. “When the team starts a review by building a list of 80% of a given market, tracking which companies we’ve eliminated and which we want to continue evaluating is both crucial and time-consuming, and we don’t want to duplicate work.”

Solution

Founders Intelligence uses Affinity to accelerate shortlisting. The platform quickly shows them whether a startup meets the criteria they’ve established and is therefore worth reaching out to.

“Affinity helps us quickly map the market and startup landscape by giving us access to data points that serve as proxies for success, such as funding numbers, investor histories—even company locations.”

Narrowing their initial pool to a midsize list involves another layer of filtering. Because the platform is flexible enough to handle data about any topic, the strategy team is able to combine these funding-related indicators of startup success with additional data using Affinity’s custom columns feature.

“We can easily build our own columns for data so we can customize lists to include third-party data such as CB Insights, PitchBook, and private benchmark reports.”  - Sebastian De Lange Kofoed, Strategy Consultant at Founders Intelligence

“We have to shorten our lists because we don’t have time to talk to everyone. Affinity helps us use our time wisely,” notes Kofoed. Using standardized taxonomies with categories like “sub-industry” or a custom ranking system to gut-check a company’s relevance makes narrowing the lists even easier.

From there, Founders Intelligence turns to Affinity’s relationship scoring, which identifies who on their team will have the most success reaching out to the startup, and who at the startup to contact.

Results

Founders Intelligence is now able to consolidate their market research, deal flow management information on tech trends, and funding data on a single platform. In addition, using Affinity for any of their projects involving VCs and startup sourcing has allowed them to:

• Automate the data collection required in the research phase.
• Leverage relationship intelligence to efficiently find the right new contacts.
• Collaborate on opportunities lists.
• Get more warm introductions by understanding the relationships between their team and prospective leads.
• Closely monitor their deal pipeline and forecast new business, from source and sponsor through to contact, proposal, and close.