We’re all in on Menlo Ventures.
The finance team at Menlo Ventures were looking for portfolio management software that gave the firm “a single source of truth” about portcos, funds, and the entire portfolio. They wanted all their data integrated into dashboards, workflows, and modeling tools so that they could get a “more timely pulse on the portfolio.” They wanted software that would show “what we hold and how it’s performing,” which meant unifying fund accounting, cap table, and KPI data and being able to easily slice and dice it. In their own words, they were looking for “the holy grail.”
Like most sophisticated private funds, the Menlo team wanted more than just a tool to collect KPIs and visualize portco performance. They were looking for a better way to use data to not only report on historical performance but also to make decisions about the future. Menlo’s deal team, which is closely aligned with the finance team, also wanted easier access to portfolio data and a smarter way to run scenario round and exit scenarios.
We’ve been through some pretty thorough vetting processes with many of the biggest venture and private equity firms in the world, but the clarity of Menlo Venture’s needs, the rigor of their evaluation, and the curiosity they demonstrated was unmatched. It wasn’t until the eve of implementation day, during dinner in San Francisco, that we found out that they initially thought Foresight was too good to be true.
But then, can you really blame them for their initial doubt?
Private market investors haven’t historically had the most robust software menu to choose from. Most of the market runs on Excel and point tools that deliver narrow functionality – KPI collection tools, capital allocation tools, LP reporting tools, etc. There have been some new entrants, particularly to the KPI collection market, with elaborate and maybe not entirely accurate promises of magical AI-powered KPI ingestion, but most of the software products in the private market are stuck in the past from both an infrastructure and UI perspective. The market was also missing the single most important foundational capability: entity resolution.
What is entity resolution?
Data about your private market investments exist in cap tables, your fund accounting system (eg Allvue, Entrilia, Investran), KPIs, your CRM (eg Affinity, Salesforce), third-party data (eg Pitchbook, Crunchbase), and the unstructured abyss that is Slack and shared drives. The answers to the most powerful questions – like how are our largest positions in which we have board seats performing relative to their competitors, or how should we allocate our reserves – tend to require all of that data.
So, you can either go scuba diving in each of those silos, which could take days or even weeks, or you could buy a software platform that integrates each source of data at an API level, unifies them into a single source of truth, and makes that data super easy to analyze through configurable dashboards, native models, and cross-functional workflows.
That’s entity resolution, and Foresight is the only product in the private market that delivers it. This is a big part of why data-driven private funds have switched from point tools to Foresight or, in the case of Menlo Ventures, held out for the holy grail.
