A Brief History of Sagacity: A letter from our founder
Over the last two years, I met with more than 150 Venture Capitalist firms from around the world.
It started with one VC who blushed as they revealed to me how little information they had on the companies in which they had invested.
Surprised and curious, I set up meetings with 10 more VCs… and heard the same thing. After 50 of these conversations, it was obvious that this was a major problem in the industry and that no suitable solution existed.
I learned there was only two ways for VCs to get reliable data on their portfolio companies.
- Ask for it directly
- Read company update emails
Those who did option 1, went on to tell me how much work was required, and how draining it was, to track down all their portfolio companies each quarter, just to get enough info for internal analysis and LP reporting. For some firms this was seen as being non-founder-friendly. For others it was a huge resource drain that yielded mediocre results, but beat the alternative of having no data.
Those who did option 2, shared that it was typically the job of an associate or analyst (many times with an Ivy League MBA) who was charged with reading each email, pulling out every piece of relevant information, organizing the data, and updating it each time another email came in. These firms also struggled with the fact that updates didn’t provide the same KPIs each time. One update might include customer count, ARR and NPS and the next one mentions MRR, headcount and a fundraising announcement.
Both of these were clearly broken systems.
But, in early stage investing, any data you can get is much better than having no data.
So, with the input from dozens of top VC firms around the world, I founded Sagacity and we’ve been steadily working to fix this problem so that VCs can save time, reduce their risk and make better investment decisions. We do this by automating the tedious back office work required to gather and synthesize data on your investments.
So far we’ve built two tools for VCs:
We built Requests for portfolio managers who regularly collect data from their companies. Now you can fully automate the portfolio surveying process, while having clear visibility into the process. We’ve iterated on this, to create the most effective and founder friendly tool available.
We built Dispatch so you never miss another signal. Just forward updates to your personal Dispatch. A secure AI model will process every email, capture every piece of relevant data, and display visual trends over time. It’s like adding an associate (or two) to your team.
I’d love to personally give you a tour of the product and hear your input for how we can make Sagacity even more valuable for VCs.
Feel free to get in touch and I’ll do my best to accommodate your schedule.
Thanks and talk soon,
Tyler
Founder