Customer Stories

About Airtree Ventures Airtree is a Sydney-based venture capital firm backing founders based in Australia and New Zealand building the iconic companies of tomorrow. The firm was founded in 2014 and is now deploying out of its 4th fund with $1.3 billion in assets under management. Their portfolio includes over 105+ portfolio companies and 250+ founders who have helped create over 17,000 jobs. Airtree’s portfolio includes the region’s breakout technology companies, such as Canva, Go1, Employment Hero, Pet Circle, Immutable, and Linktree. For this case study, we spoke to Dan Lombard who is the Data Lead at Airtree Ventures. Related article: Airtree Ventures already returned its first fund thanks to Canva while maintaining the majority of its stake Fragmented Systems and Processes Prior to Visible Prior to the integration of Visible, Airtree relied heavily on a fragmented system of spreadsheets to manage their portfolio of 105+ companies. Each quarter, four employees were tasked with managing the relationships with the points of contact at 15 to 20 portfolio companies through manual outreach and communications. This reliance on spreadsheets resulted in inefficiencies and potential data loss, as spreadsheets are prone to break when modified. Challenges With Data Accuracy and Scaling Manual Outreach to a Growing Portfolio Before Visible, 80% of Airtree’s portfolio monitoring problem was having clean data and scaling outreach to their portfolio companies. They faced two primary challenges with their former system: Operational Efficiency: Four team members spent significant time manually collecting data from over 100 companies every quarter. The Airtree team members were sending one-off email communications to each company and manually keeping track of who needed to be followed up with at each company which diverted resources from other critical projects they could be working on. Data Integrity and Scalability: Frequent changes to the data in spreadsheets resulted in errors in the sheets and data loss, which caused frustration as there was no way of understanding which changes were made to the sheet and when. This process made it difficult to scale portfolio monitoring operations as Airtree grew. Why Airtree Chose Visible as their Portfolio Monitoring Platform Airtree chose Visible for its robust, scalable, and user-friendly platform. Key factors influencing their choice included: Ease of Use and Customization: Visible's platform offered unparalleled customization and ease of use. Support and Development: Visible’s team actively listened to feedback, offered best practices, and continuously invested in their product, ensuring a partnership that catered to Airtree’s evolving needs. Automation and Integration: Visible excelled in automating portfolio monitoring and offered a frictionless experience for founders. Airtree leveraged the Visible API to seamlessly integrate data into their existing data warehouse system. Airtree’s historical data collection process, previously led by four Airtree team members, is now a streamlined process led only by Dan, who leverages Visible Requests to collect data from their portfolio of 105+ companies. Visible Requests empowers Dan to send customized link-based data requests to each company, automate the email reminder process, and easily keep track of where companies are in the reporting process. View an example Visible Request below. Onboarded to Visible within 24 Hours Visible provided Airtree with an efficient and supported onboarding. When asked about Airtree's onboarding with Visible Dan Lombard shared the following: Visible stood out by enabling a swift and seamless transition that was operational in less than 24 hours, a stark contrast to other providers who estimated a quarter for full implementation. This rapid integration was facilitated by a comprehensive onboarding template provided by Visible. Visible API & Airtree’s Data Infrastructure With the implementation of Visible, Airtree wanted to take a more sophisticated approach to the way they handle their portfolio data with the goal of driving more valuable insights for their team. The approach needed to be automated, integrate with other data sources, and have a singular view accessible for the whole team. This was not possible when their data lived in disparate systems, files, and spreadsheets. Dan Lombard has led the improvement of Airtree's data infrastructure. Now, data sources like Visible and Affinity are piped into Snowflake via recurring AWS Lambda jobs. Airtree leverages the Visible API daily. Dan mentioned that while Airtree collects data quarterly, a daily sync of the data is crucial because Airtree is always onboarding new companies, communicating with their founders, and uploading historical data. “The Visible API gives us this level of daily fidelity and only takes the AWS Lambda job 5 minutes to populate an entire data architecture.” - Dan Lombard, Data Lead at Airtree Ventures Once the data is in their database, Snowflake handles the ETL and entity matching. Airtree then has Streamlit sit on top of Snowflake to query data, provision access, and build out new insights. Advice for Other VC Firms Building Out Their Data Infrastructure Don’t overcomplicate things to start. It is easy to get caught up in the bells and whistles. Dan recommends a bias towards simplicity. Start small and use it as a stepping stone as you build things out. Conclusion Airtree’s adoption of Visible transformed their portfolio management by automating key processes and centralizing data, thus enabling more strategic decision-making and efficient operations. The case of Airtree is a testament to how the right technological partnerships can profoundly impact business efficiency and data management.

About Moxxie Moxxie was founded in 2019 by former Twitter executive Katie Stanton. Prior to starting Moxxie Katie worked at Google, in the Obama administration as a Special Advisor to the Office of Innovation, and co-founded the angel group #Angels. In 2021, Katie brought on Alex Roetter, whom she had worked with before at both Twitter and Google, as an equal partner in Moxxie’s second fund of $85M. Alex joined Moxxie with a wealth of operational and engineering experience from previously serving as the Senior VP of engineering at Twitter for 6 years as well as working as a software engineer at Google and various other early-stage startups. Today, Moxxie has invested in over 60+ seed-stage companies in the consumer, enterprise, fintech, health tech, and climate sectors. The team at Moxxie is differentiated by their operational experience and focus on underrepresented founders. According to an article published in Forbes, out of the 27 investments from Moxxie’s first fund, 36% were founded by women, 40% by people of color, 8% by Black founders and 43% by immigrant founders. Learn more about Moxxie. This Case Study was put together in collaboration with Alex Roetter, Managing Director and General Partner at Moxxie. What Moxxie was doing prior to using Visible In the early days at Moxxie, the team used a combination of check-in calls at varying frequencies, ad-hoc meetings, and texts to gather updates from their companies. Later on, they created a Google Group email alias where founders sent their updates so the communications were all stored in one inbox. The Moxxie team kept a summary of each company in a combined Google Document that was updated irregularly. The portfolio monitoring challenges Moxxie was facing The main issue with Moxxie’s ad-hoc method was that “...it was just all very manual. It was a mish-mash of documents and hard to maintain. We were inconsistent in how up-to-date we were on different companies,” shared Alex, Moxxie’s Managing Director. The manual effort required to stay on top of portfolio companies meant portfolio monitoring was “...falling to the wayside and we were not doing as good of a job [monitoring our companies] as we needed to be.” “...it was just all very manual. It was a mish-mash of documents and hard to maintain. We were inconsistent in how up-to-date we were on different companies." It’s common for investors to feel overwhelmed as they attempt to manually keep up to date on a growing number of portfolio companies despite recognizing the benefits of doing so. Alex emphasized that the main reason Moxxie wanted to improve their portfolio monitoring was to ensure they were spending their time most effectively at their firm. It was hard to identify which companies needed their support and where Moxxie's time would be most valuably spent “...without having a regular heartbeat from [their] portfolio companies.” The reasons Moxxie chose Visible Moxxie’s founder Katie Stanton was told to check out Visible’s KPI tracking capabilities at the end of 2022 while she was attending the Equity Summit, an invitation-only gathering that brings together thought-leading LPs and GPs that drive industry change. Alex from Moxxie reached out to Visible soon after the initial referral to schedule a demo. The demo confirmed that the Visible platform had exactly what Alex was looking for in a portfolio KPI tracking tool. Moxxie's portfolio monitoring criteria included: An automated way to send structured data requests to portfolio companies A solution that wasn’t taxing on their founders Allowed founders to share their data within seconds Ability to see all their portfolio data in one clear place Ability to easily build Tear Sheets for each company Moxxie's onboarding experience with Visible Moxxie’s onboarding took approximately 9 days to complete. When asked to share feedback on Visible’s onboarding process Alex shared “Everything was great. Whenever we had bulk data in a CSV that needed to be uploaded we shared it with Visible and it was uploaded within 24 hours.” Check out additional Visible reviews on G2. How Moxxie is leveraging Visible to streamline portfolio monitoring and reporting processes today Today Moxxie doesn’t have to remember to check in with their companies or make guesses about their companies’ recent progress updates. Instead, Visible has enabled Moxxie to send automatic, recurring, structured data requests to their companies that can be completed without their founders ever having to log in or create an account. The Moxxie team is immediately notified when companies complete data Requests. From there, they are able to easily identify which companies need more support. This streamlined, founder-friendly process ensures the Moxxie team can continue to spend time on high-value fund operations, such as deal flow, while also efficiently monitoring and supporting current portfolio companies. Taking a closer look at Moxxie’s use of the Visible platform, the team primarily uses four main features on Visible: Requests, Tear Sheets, Reports, and Updates. Requests: Streamlining Moxxie’s portfolio KPI data collection process Moxxie uses Visible’s Request feature to collect 5 metrics from companies on a regular basis. The firm collects data from early-stage companies on a monthly basis and on a quarterly basis for more mature companies in their portfolio. The five metrics Moxxie collects include: Revenue Runway Cash Spend Cash Balance Headcount Moxxie also includes a qualitative text block in their Request that provides companies with an opportunity to add additional context to their metrics, share any additional updates, or ask Moxxie for support on specific items. Alex shared that likes that the Visible platform sends him a notification each time a company submits a Request. He uses this as an opportunity to quickly identify any changes to the company’s performance. Alex shared “...anytime there’s something unexpected it’s a reminder to check in with the company.” Reports: Building a custom investment data report before an annual meeting Another key feature that Moxxie is utilizing is Visible’s report feature which allows Moxxie to pull together select metrics and investment data into a single table view. Moxxie has a fund summary for both Fund I and Fund II that includes: initial ownership %, total invested, total invested from a specific fund, and the initial valuation for each company. Moxxie initially created this report to prepare for an annual meeting with LPs. They wanted to see the numbers across all their portfolio companies, be able to download the figures, and then compute averages. Tear Sheets: Creating a clear overview of individual company performance Moxxie utilizes Visible’s dashboard templates to create custom Tear Sheets for each of their companies. Moxxie’s Tear Sheets incorporate elements of their original investment memo coupled with dynamic metrics and qualitative updates that change over time. Integrating company properties into Tear Sheets The static information in Moxxie's Tear Sheets is pulled directly from companies' profiles in Visible. The information that Moxxie includes in their Tear Sheets are: Company website url Latest valuation Co-investors Founders Company summary Why we invested Status Deal source Initial ownership Initial valuation Investment date Total invested Sector HQ location Year founded Integrated dynamic charts into Tear Sheets Moxxie also incorporates data visualizations into their Tear Sheets which are automatically updated as companies submit new information to Visible. The dynamic information Moxxie includes in Tear sheets is: Monthly KPI’s in a bar chart Runway vs Headcount in a bar chart Monthly spend vs cash balance in a bar chart Revenue forecast vs actual in a bar chart Update/progress since investment in a text widget Key metrics in a text widget Company-specific metrics in a text widget View Tear Sheet examples from Visible. Updates: Communicating portfolio performance with LPs on a quarterly basis Moxxie also leverages Visible’s Updates feature to send outbound communication to their LPs and the wider Moxxie community on a quarterly basis. The firm uses Visible’s Update feature instead of its previous Google Group as a way to consolidate its tech stack. Alex shares that he finds the open rates and viewing analytics helpful so he can understand how LPs are engaging with their regular communications. Conclusion Moxxie chose to move forward with Visible’s founder-friendly portfolio monitoring solution after hearing about Visible’s KPI tracking capabilities through a credible referral. By adopting Visible, Moxxie’s ad-hoc, manual portfolio monitoring processes have been transformed into a streamlined cadence for collecting structured updates from their companies. The firm previously stored outdated company summaries in Google Documents and now the Moxxie team leverages neatly organized Tear Sheets that auto-update when companies share new information. Over 400+ VC firms are using Visible to streamline their portfolio monitoring and reporting process.

What is a Portfolio Review Meeting in Venture Capital A portfolio review meeting in the context of Venture Capital is a dedicated time for the investment and operational team members at an investment firm to align on recent updates across the portfolio. Other purposes of this meeting are to exchange cross-functional insights and coordinate the best ways to support portfolio companies. Who typically leads Portfolio Review Meetings? Portfolio review meetings can be led by anyone at the firm but since the meetings are largely focused on updates about portfolio companies, it is often led by the person responsible for collecting and synthesizing updates from portfolio companies on a regular basis. At a smaller firm, this person may be a Partner, and at a larger VC firm, this person often has the title of Platform Manager, Director of Portfolio Operations, or someone in finance. Ultimately, it should be led by someone with a wide-lens view of what is going on across the portfolio. Related Resource –> Portfolio Data Collection Tips for VCs Portfolio Review Meeting Frequency According to a poll led by Visible, 50% of VC’s are hosting Portfolio Review Meetings on a quarterly basis, followed by 29% weekly, and 14% monthly. The frequency of this meeting largely depends on the size of your portfolio company and how hands-on you are with your companies. A quarterly frequency makes sense for most VC firms because 70% of investors are collecting structured data from their companies on a quarterly basis. (Source data is aggregated usage data on Visible’s portfolio monitoring platform used by 350+ VC funds). Three Necessary Elements to Lead an Effective Portfolio Review Meeting 1) Up-to-date, accurate information from portfolio companies Most investors are collecting 5-15 metrics from companies on a quarterly basis. These include core financial KPI’s and sector-specific metrics. Additionally, it’s common to ask for qualitative updates from companies as well to ensure you have a holistic view of how a company is performing. Related Resource –> Which Metrics Should I be Collecting from My Portfolio Companies 2) Customizable visualizations to engage your team Looking at just raw data points from companies can be, well…boring. To get more engagement during Portfolio Review Meetings it’s a great idea to create engaging visualizations that clearly demonstrate the growth journeys your companies are on. By displaying your data in a Flexible Portfolio Company Dashboard your team will be able to more clearly identify trends and insights. To help your team digest the information about portfolio companies, it’s important to keep your data visualizations consistent for each company. Visible makes this easy by allowing you to save custom dashboards as templates and apply them to all companies in just a few clicks. Learn more about creating flexible dashboards for portfolio review meetings in the video below. 3) A Place to Take Notes & Document Action Items It’s a great idea to document meeting discussion notes and action items as soon as they arise during a meeting. Documenting action items on a company’s dashboard is a great way to keep team members accountable for execution because you can refer back to the notes during future meetings. How Investors Are Leveraging Visible to Enhance Portfolio Review Meetings VKAV’s Portfolio Company Dashboards Verod-Kepple Africa Ventures (VKAV), a long-term Visible user, hosts a formal Portfolio Review Meeting on a quarterly basis. During this meeting, Portfolio Review Committee members join to review the performance of the portfolio companies during the quarter. Additionally, VKAV’s investment team holds an internal Portfolio Review Meeting every other week. Right now, the purpose of this meeting is mostly to check the status of action items (either for VKAV or the portfolio company). VKAV keeps track of open action items directly on a company’s dashboard in Visible so that it is linked to the broader context of how the company is performing. View VKAV’s Portfolio Review Dashboard Example –> View Dashboard 01 Advisors Approach to Portfolio Review Meetings 01 Advisors a San Francisco-based venture firm utilizes Visible’s Request feature to streamline the way they collect data from companies on a quarterly basis. The team meets 1-2 times per quarter for an internal Portfolio Review meeting. Check out their meeting agenda outline below. 01 Advisors Portfolio Review Meeting Agenda Investment Strategy Portfolio Company Categorization Reserve Allocation Strategy Portfolio Company Support Learn more about how 01 Advisors uses Visible for the internal portfolio review meetings in this video.

Jessica is the co-founder and president of Maad, francophone Africa’s fastest-growing B2B e-commerce player. Jessica and her team adopted Visible in December 2021 to start sending out investor updates for the first time after closing a pre-seed round. Since then the team at Maad has continued to leverage Visible’s suite of fundraising tools such as data rooms and pitch decks. Maad successfully closed its seed round led by Ventures Platform in late 2023. Read more about their recent coverage in TechCrunch here. This case study details why Maad chose Visible and the specific solutions they leveraged to support the successful raise of their seed round. Jessica's Founder Journey—From Airbnb to Empowering Retail Owners in Africa Maad was co-founded by Jessica Long in 2021. Jessica has a demonstrated passion for creating software that adds value operationally. She fostered this passion in her previous work as a software engineer at Airbnb, building systems to support novel machine learning and crowdsourcing technology at Idibon in San Francisco, and leading the development of national digital health platforms in West Africa as the Director of Global Services at Dimagi. Jessica started Maad because she believed that better data tools could transform the business landscape of Senegal and other developing West African countries. After spending two years building out a generalizable tech platform to track field operations of all kinds, she and her cofounders zeroed in on the informal retail market. With 100,000s of small shops sourcing the same products from a patchwork supply network, Jessica saw a big opportunity to connect small shops directly to the agribusinesses supplying them. Maad is now Francophone Africa's fastest-growing B2B e-commerce player. Maad supplies food, beverages, and everyday household products to thousands of small shops. The company is dedicated to empowering traditional retailers in Francophone West Africa. Their product offerings provide traditional retailers with a mobile app that’s a one-stop shop for all their supply needs and Fast-Moving Consumer Goods (FMCG) brands with a complete picture of the fragmented consumer market. The Need to Professionalize Investor Communications After Raising a Pre-seed Round Maad closed a pre-seed round in 2021 led by Launch Africa, Oui Capital, and Alumni Ventures. This was the first time Jessica and her cofounders had ever sent out monthly investor updates. Their first attempt included a few bullet points in an email to which her investors gave her feedback: “You could be doing this more professionally.” Jessica’s early investors explained that monthly updates are often the first thing that new investors will look at to understand the trajectory of a company. “Writing crisp, effective updates was one of the best ways to showcase our company’s growth and development,” - Jessica Long, Co-Founder and President of Maad The team at Maad took this feedback to heart and evaluated several tools for the job. In response to why Jessica chose Visible she shared, “Visible struck us as the best choice, with its emphasis on high-quality email reports.” Jessica highlighted specific features that made Visible stand out: Filterable contact lists that make it easy to manage the email’s audience The ability to add charts and graphs inline The optional live data integration The ability to add photos and GIFs Recipient engagement tracking Maad’s Growing Need for Visible’s Fundraising Solutions Originally Maad’s primary use case for Visible was sending out monthly updates to investors. When Maad started its second fundraise, Visible became its centralized fundraising solution where they also hosted their pitch decks and data rooms as well. “It truly became a home for sharing information with investors about our company.” - Jessica Long, Co-Founder and President of Maad Since first leveraging Visible in December 2021 to update current investors, Maad utilized Visible’s more advanced fundraising solutions and successfully closed their Seed round of $2.3M (in equity) in late 2023. The round was led by Ventures Platform. Read more about the announcement of Maad’s recent financing in TechCrunch here. Visible Impact on Maad’s Investor Engagements Visible has equipped Maad to send high-quality investor updates every month since December 2021. Visible's update engagement tracking allowed Jessica to see how closely prospective investors were following her company, which helped their team prioritize their timespend during the seed stage fundraise. Increasingly, the team at Maad kept all investor-related information assets on the Visible platform including monthly investor updates, pitch decks, and data rooms. This created a clean and consistent place for sharing information and tracking engagement. “Every month we get compliments on the quality of the investor updates we are able to generate with Visible’s platform.” Maad’s Top Four Visible Solutions Jessica shared the key advantages of using the Visible platform are: The beautiful and polished investor updates Thoughtful collaboration and versioning features Engagement tracking Consolidation of all major sources of investor information onto a single platform Below are some examples of some of Maad’s favorite solutions in Visible. 1) The ability to store investor updates all in one place. This makes it easy to review previous updates, track engagement rates, and resend the updates if needed. 2) Fun features like directly embedded GIFs in newsletters allow us to connect with Maad’s supporters with more immediacy. 3) Uploading different pitch decks to the same link is an incredible feature for us. We love the versioning and collaboration this allows us internally, while presenting a unified experience to external collaborators 4) Beautiful graphs, directly configurable on the platform, are one of the most popular features of our monthly updates:

It’s common for venture firms to start raising their next fund in the last year of capital deployment, typically years 3-4 of a fund’s life. This poses a sort of chicken-and-egg problem because many of the common fund performance metrics that Limited Partners use to drive allocation decisions only become reliable, and therefore more meaningful, around year six (Source: Cambridge Associates). Farooq Abbasi, founder and General Partner of Preface Ventures, created a Seed Stage Enterprise VC Funding Napkin to help GPS think through alternative fund metrics that help communicate performance outside the traditional indicators that LPs use to measure success for more mature funds. The Seed Stage Enterprise VC Funding Napkin helps answer the question "What is good enough to raise a subsequent fund in the current market conditions". Farooq from Preface Ventures joined us on Tuesday, February 27th for a discussion about the fund performance metrics GPs can use to benchmark and communicate fund performance when it's still 'early'. View the recording below. Webinar Topics The issue with ‘typical’ fund performance metrics for ‘early’ funds Overview of Preface Venture’s Seed Stage Enterprise VC Funding Napkin Deep dive into alternative early performance benchmarks How to keep track of alternative fund performance metrics How to leverage alternative fund performance indicators into your fundraising narrative Inside look into how Preface Ventures keeps LPs up to date Q&A Resources From the Webinar Christoph Janz's What does it take to raise capital, in SaaS, in 2023? Preface Ventures' A GP's View on VC Fund Performance When It's Early Diversity VC About Preface Ventures Preface Ventures is a New York City-based firm started in 2020 led by Farooq Abbasi. Preface invests $500-$2M at the pre-seed and seed stage into startups who are building the Frontier Enterprise structure. Preface has 20 active positions in Fund II and 7 active positions in Fund III. (Learn more)

"The most successful fund managers are going to be the ones who are really authentic to what is important to them and they make sure every attribute of their model reflects that authenticity." - Gale Wilkinson About the Webinar Markdowns and lack of LP distributions resulted in a challenging fundraising year for many VCs. The firms that did close new funds in 2023 had to put in extra work to stand out and foster confidence from new investors. Visible had the pleasure of hosting Gale Wilkinson from VITALIZE Venture Capital on Tuesday, January 30th to discuss what she learned while closing her second fund in Q4 of 2023. You can view the webinar recording below. Webinar topics This webinar was designed for people working in Venture Capital who want to learn more about the VC fundraising process. Webinar topics included: Overview of VITALIZE's fundraising process Pre-fundraising activities that made a difference How LP diligence differed between Fund I and Fund II How Gale leverages social media to build both her personal and professional brand Reviewing VITALIZE's fundraising pitch deck Advice for GP's raising in 2024 You can view the presentation deck here. Key Takeaways Expect raising your first and second fund to take 2-3 years Stay authentic to what's most important to you as a fund manager and what you're great at. Make sure every attribute of that model reflects your authenticity. Most GP decks are too long. Gale's advice --> Find out what about your story is most interesting and give enough information to make it extremely clear about who you are and what you do without going into confidential information.

About Fuel Ventures Fuel Ventures is a UK-based venture capital firm founded by Mark Pearson in 2014. Today, Fuel Ventures manages over £350 million in assets and has a portfolio of over 160 investments. Fuel is considered one of the most active early and growth-stage investors in the UK. Fuel Ventures invests at the pre-seed and seed stage of globally scalable marketplaces, platforms, and SaaS companies. Fuel takes an active board role at all their companies and commits to supporting companies throughout their journeys. Learn more about Fuel Ventures. Fuel Ventures joined Visible in October of 2022. This case study includes feedback and insight from Oli Hammond and Mike Stevenson. Data disaggregation before Visible Before using Visible, Fuel Ventures' portfolio information was disaggregated in multiple Google solutions. Investment data was tracked in a master Google sheet file, qualitative information about companies was manually updated and saved to Google documents, and all of this information was stored in various Google Drive folders. As the Fuel Ventures portfolio grew, the master spreadsheet became harder to maintain. The team also found it cumbersome to have portfolio information stored in several different locations. “We felt we needed a solution where all portfolio information was stored in one place as Fuel’s single source of truth.” - Oli Hammond, Partner at Fuel Ventures Why Fuel Ventures chose Visible The Fuel Ventures team began researching the market for potential solutions that would meet their portfolio monitoring and reporting requirements. The Fuel Ventures' decision-making criteria included: A provider with a straightforward onboarding The ability to upload all of their historical data A solution that was at least 5x better (faster, more efficient, more accurate) than their current process Built-in flexibility to accommodate the details of their investments A solution with a justifiable return on investment The team at Fuel Ventures sat a tailored demo with Visible in the summer of 2022. Fuel chose Visible as the best solution to help their team better manage Fuel's portfolio and fund performance. Implementing Visible at Fuel Ventures Visible provided a hands-on onboarding experience to Fuel Ventures who needed to upload investment details for approximately 130 investments. “The Visible team was there to support us throughout the entire onboarding experience.” - Oli Hammond, Partner at Fuel Ventures When asked about what the learning curve was like for the team at Fuel Ventures, Oli Hammond commented, “It was easy. The team took to the platform really quickly.” How Fuel is using Visible today Adopting Visible significantly impacted the way Fuel Ventures monitors their portfolio companies. Visible provides the 20+ person team at Fuel with one centralized place for investment information, notes, and qualitative updates about portfolio companies. For Fuel Ventures, Visible’s investment tracking solution is especially beneficial because their team now has granular visibility into investments round by round and fund by fund which is something they had difficulty tracking in a master spreadsheet in the past. Visible also provides Fuel with a centralized place to store notes and company updates. This means the team at Fuel can now click into a company's profile on Visible and see a clear overview of initial investments, subsequent funding rounds, and narrative updates all in one place instead of having to dig through separate platforms. “Visible is our one source of truth for the wider team to find relevant company information instead of having to dig through various Google Drive folders.” - Oli Hammond, Partner Finally, the team at Fuel shared that Visible significantly improved the way they create bi-annual reporting for their Limited Partners. Minna from Fuel Ventures commented, “It’s now much easier to format the Tear Sheets we compile for our investor reporting. We really like that the Tear Sheets are automatically updated with live numbers instead of having to make updates in Word.” View more examples of tear sheets in Visible. Advice for other funds considering Visible Oli Hammond, Partner at Fuel shared "Visible is a great choice for funds who are looking to move away from fragmented systems and methodology (Word, Google Drive, spreadsheets) to one source of truth.”

About Novel Novel is a Los Angeles-based software startup led by Joe DeWulf. Novel helps e-commerce brands easily embed shoppable short-form video content from social platforms like TikTok and Instagram on their websites. The result is an increase in the website visit duration and a 20%+ increase in webpage revenue for their customers. Joe pivoted the company towards the end of 2022 and officially launched Novel in January 2023. The company is demonstrating exciting traction with the number of influenced sales for their customers growing from one million per month in September to over five million influenced sales in November. Novel has been a Visible user since 2022 and during that time Joe has grown his engaged investor network from 100 to 500 investors and keeps them up to date using Visible. Cumbersome investor management in Excel Before finding Visible, Joe was tracking investor contacts in Excel documents which he noted was very cumbersome. He would manually keep investor records up to date and track basic information like ‘interested’ or ‘not interested’. Then Joe would send out one standardized email with his list of investors in BCC. This non-tailored approach wasn’t ideal because all investors received the same content even if their interests and characteristics varied. There was also no way to track open or engagement rates with the email. Joe thought there had to be an easier way to keep his investor contacts more organized in different lists so he could tailor his communications and went searching for a fundraising CRM for startups. Leveraging Visible to send regular updates to investors Joe’s primary use case when he joined Visible was to start sending out regular, professional investor updates to current and potential investors to increase awareness about their company’s growth and fundraising journey. The first update was sent on Feb 15, 2022 to 104 people and had an open rate of 78%. The content of the first update included: Business timeline Company overview & product in development Highlights Lowlights Asks Product By using Visible’s Connect Database, asking for investor introductions, and organically growing his network, Joe has grown his list of engaged current and potential investors to over 500+ people that he keeps up to date with Visible. Managing fundraising pipelines In addition to being able to more easily send out regular communication to investors using Visible, Joe is also able to more strategically manage potential investors using Visible’s fundraising pipeline. Joe commented that he’s now able to more easily keep track of multiple points of contact at an investment firm, typical check size, whether they are a lead or not. These criteria help determine whether the investor is a good fit before reaching out to the investor. Novel has multiple fundraising pipelines in Visible which mirrors the fluid approach required to raising capital in today’s highly competitive fundraising environment. Joe started with a pipeline targeting traditional seed-stage VCs and then widened the approach to also targeting high-net-worth individuals as well as investors who back companies at an even earlier stage. Joe commented that it was important to be able to quickly adjust his pipeline after paying attention to signals he was getting from investors that the prerequisites towards raising a seed round have changed. Joe shared some advice for founders currently looking to fundraise -- “You need to be able to adapt, do research, create new contacts, and new pipelines, and manage them appropriately.” The flexibility built into Visible’s fundraising pipelines lets startups quickly adapt to the feedback they get from the market and adjust their fundraising strategy accordingly. Making an impression with professional deck-sharing solutions Novel also utilizes Visible’s deck-sharing solution to socialize their company with potential investors. Joe said the deck-sharing solution is a major upgrade from his previous method of just sending a PDF because now he gets notified when investors are viewing the deck. He can also tell when the deck has been sent to other contacts and can understand which investors are spending the most time reviewing the deck. Novel hosts multiple versions of their deck on Visible including a short version to pique the interest of investors with the goal of them booking a call and a longer more detailed version after he’s had initial conversations with investors. Joe recently shared a popular LinkedIn post and in response was getting notifications that investors were going back and reviewing a pitch deck he had shared months previously. Novel conclusions Novel replaced disorganized Excel spreadsheets and lackluster investor communications with easy-to-use investor relations solutions designed specifically for founders. Today Novel uses Visible to keep its network of over 500 investors up to date about their company's traction and fundraising journey. Take the next steps with Visible Visible supports thousands of founders track key metrics, update investors, and manage their fundraising process from one platform. Start your 14-day free trial.

About Laurel & Hampr Laurel Hess is the CEO and Founder of hampr. hampr is a peer-to-peer, on-demand laundry app that provides magical wash-and-fold service at the push of a button! As the hampr website states, “The idea for hampr came after a chaotic weekend with kid sports games and 3 birthday parties. On top of that, there was still grocery shopping, cleaning the house, and oh, spending meaningful time with the family. Laurel was over it. So she thought “Hold on, why can’t laundry be as easy as ordering groceries with a tap of your phone?” And just like that, bam! hampr was born in 2020.” Quick facts: Founded Year: 2020 Headquarters: Lafayette, Louisiana Total Funding Amount: $9.7M Notable Investors: Techstars,VILLAGEx Learn more about hampr and give it a try yourself here The Power of Investor Updates for Laurel Investor updates can be a powerful tool for startup founders. Most VCS only hear from 10-50% of their portfolio companies on a regular basis. This is a major arbitrage opportunity for founders. Investor updates can help you stay top of mind with investors and secure help with fundraising, hiring, closing customers, strategy, etc — all in just an hour or less. As Laurel Hess wrote in her LinkedIn Post, “It boggles my mind how many founders don't do regular company updates to stakeholders (and potential investors!). So many people I know treat this as a chore - when it can be the highlight of your month (like it is mine!). Taking the time to review your business with your stakeholders is actually a really great opportunity for growth - if you view it that way, there is a ton of potential to unlock. I have gained the following from my regular updates: Intros to potential investors Additional capital for a round I'm working on Intros to new verticals for expansion Advice on strategy for a problem we are working on Intros to new mentors/advisors to unlock the next phase of growth Allllll this for just 1 hour of my time each month? That is the definition of no-brainer." Laurel’s Investor Update Template Sticking to a template and format can help build regular investor updates into your monthly rhythms. Laurel shared her monthly template that she uses in Visible via a LinkedIn Post, you can check it out below as well: “I have used Visible to manage my updates almost since the beginning. I love this company - they make it SO EFFORTLESS to send really factual, data-driven updates. SO, using Visible, this is how my monthly updates are typically structured: 1. Overview - this is a high-level, personal letter from me about the high notes and low notes of the update. Basically a TL/DR section. 2. Asks - I don't always have these but when I do, I have them right after my summary so it's high on the scroll. 3. Performance - I add charts on GMV growth month-over-month followed by membership KPIs in a chart (growth, churn and renewal). Then I add a summary with my insights/thoughts on each chart. Check out an example of a Visible chart below: 4. What we are excited about: A section on 1 or 2 things that the team is working on that we are really excited about - usually with a photo. 5. What we are Improving/Exploring: This is a realness section of challenges and concerns that we have and what we are doing to actively improve on them. AND THAT'S IT! It gives a super high-level overview of where we are, what our focus is, and how we are unlocking new opportunities. It's skimmable, it's concise and it's easy for everyone. AND because I use Visible.vc, it automatically ports in the numbers I need for my charts each month so all I have to do is replicate the previous month's email and then go to town. I can get a very thoughtful email out in 1 hour or less - and it gives me so much more in return.” Check out Laurel's template and add it to your Visible account below: Send Your Next Investor Update with Visible Join Laurel and the 3,300+ founders that use Visible to update their investors every month. Try Visible free for 14 days. Not sure where to get started? Check out our Update Template Library.

We can all agree that first impressions matter. Onboarding a new investment into your VC firm’s community is a key step in setting up the investor <> company relationship for success. Join us Tuesday, August 29th for a discussion with two leaders in VC Operations, Steph Jones from Forum Ventures and Amelia Zack from M13, on how to set up effective portfolio company onboarding processes at your VC firm. This webinar is designed for people working in VC operations who want to improve the way they engage with their portfolio companies post-investment. Discussion topics: Defining the company onboarding process for your firm and why it matters Welcoming companies into your community Connecting companies to resources Setting expectations about portfolio data collection Q&A

A recent poll of VCs shows that some of the primary reasons investors collect financial data from portfolio companies is to improve their post-investment support (66%) and inform future investment decisions (44%). To do this well, investors need to be able to analyze their portfolio company data through an advanced financial lens so they can extract actionable insights that lead to improved fund performance. We recently sat down for a conversation on Leveraging Portfolio Analysis to Improve your Fund’s IRR with Kristian Marquez, CFA. Kristian is the CEO of FinStrat Management and a Chartered Financial Analyst (CFA) charterholder since 2004. The webinar was designed for people working in Venture Capital who want to level up the way they understand and analyze their portfolio companies’ financial performance data. Topics Discussed: The WHY behind surfacing portfolio insights Where to find benchmark data and how to use it Top 4 performance indicators, what they mean, and how to calculate them Using dashboards in Visible to evaluate portfolio company performance Tips for moving from analysis to action

Render Capital is a $30M early-stage VC fund with offices in Kentucky and Indiana. Led by Patrick Henshaw, Render has invested in 50+ companies as a part of its mission to create a robust and thriving regional economy where entrepreneurs see the Midwest and South as a place they can find appropriate risk capital necessary for them to start and grow. For this case study, Visible interviewed Render Capital’s Operating Partner Mike Shepard. Customer Story: How Render Capital Uses Visible to Streamline Fund Reporting Watch the video below to learn why Render chose Visible to streamline their portfolio monitoring and reporting processes. Prefer to read? Keep scrolling to read a paraphrased summary of Mike’s responses. Q: How were you collecting data prior to using Visible? Prior to Visible, Render was doing very little to collect data from companies because it was too time-consuming to do it via email and the process wasn’t very organized. Q: What factors led you to choosing Visible? We looked at other software to help with our fund management and the options seemed cumbersome, the relationships were tricky, and it seemed like it was actually going to be more work. I wanted to find a solution that let me pair our fund management alongside our own metrics so we could do our own reporting by creating dashboards and sharing those with LPs. We also liked that Visible helped collect reporting from our companies on a regular basis. Q: What was the onboarding with Visible like? I filled out a spreadsheet with our company and investment data. I prefer to be hands-on so the next step was just figuring out how to set up my own LP Update templates and reports. Visible was available to answer all my questions and the team was open to our feedback. “It feels like we’re your only customer which is what you’re supposed to do.” – Mike Shephard, Operating Partner at Render Capital Q: What has been the result of using Visible The results have been great. I created an LP Update template which we consider a marketing extension of our brand. To get this to look nice outside of Visible, in Excel, would have taken me a lot of time. I can use the template I created in Visible over and over again and it automatically updates. Our LPs are also really happy with the direction of our reporting and what we’re producing. We are getting our LPs the information that they want and need in a format that they can easily digest. Over 350+ VC funds are using Visible to streamline their portfolio monitoring and reporting.

About The Artemis Fund The Artemis Fund is on a mission to diversify the face of wealth. Founded in 2019 in Houston Texas, the firm is led by General Partners Diana Murakhovskaya, Leslie Goldman, and Stephanie Campbell. Their team of five invests at the seed stage and leverages their conviction that the future of financial services and commerce will be written by diverse entrepreneurs. The Artemis Fund has invested in 20 disruptive fintech, e-commerce tech, and care-tech companies founded and led by women. The Artemis Fund joined Visible in April 2021 with the primary objective of streamlining the way they collect both core financial metrics and impact metrics from their growing portfolio. For two years in a row now, The Artemis Fund has turned their metrics into a data-driven impact report using Visible’s portfolio monitoring tools. Unexpected Benefits of Creating Impact Reports Juliette Richert from The Artemis Fund shared the objective of their impact reports has broadened over time — reaping more benefits than they originally intended. Impact is integral to The Artemis Fund’s investment thesis so there was always a desire to measure their impact; however, the primary objective of publishing their first impact report in 2021 was for fundraising from future LPs. Needing data to back up the narrative of your portfolio’s performance to LP’s is something we commonly hear from investors using Visible. Over time, the team at Artemis realized the companies they were investing in were having an outsized impact on the communities they are serving. Juliette shared their “portfolio companies are very focused on their end users.” The Artemis team worked with their founders to identify which impact metrics are most integral to their businesses and then Artemis began tracking them using Visible’s portfolio monitoring tools. This larger ripple effect is a major driver behind Artemis’ work and so the team was excited to have actual metrics to back up their investment strategy. The Artemis Fund’s 2022 impact report clearly communciates their thesis and the narrative behind their portfolio companies’ performance, both of which are made more compelling because they’re backed up by data. This year they distributed their impact report to their wider network. The unexpected result was that it has become a valuable marketing tool for their fund for not just potential investors but it’s helped attract more founders to their deal pipeline as well. Artemis’ report clearly demonstrates that they’re not just paying lip service to investing and supporting female founders — they’re actually executing against their values and have the data to prove it. “Using Visible streamlines the way we collect and digest metrics, helping us understand the health of our portfolio and address potential issues proactively.” — Juliette Richert, The Artemis Fund Choosing Which Impact Metrics to Track The first step of creating Artemis’ Impact Report was choosing which metrics to track from their portfolio companies and setting up a data Request in Visible. Check out an Example Portfolio Data Request in Visible. The Artemis Fund created 35+ custom metrics in Visible, some of which were collected from all companies, and the rest were assigned to specific companies based on the business model or sector. Headcount Metrics Artemis collects these metrics from all companies on an annual basis. FTE Headcount PTE/Contractor Headcount Diverse Headcount # Female Headcount # Custom Impact Metrics Artemis assigns these metrics to specific companies in VIsible and collects them on an annual basis. The list below is not comprehensive. CO2 Saved (Assigned to portfolio company DressX) Families Served (Assigned to portfolio company Hello Divorce) Musicians Served (Assigned to portfolio company Green Room) Financial Metrics Artemis collects these metrics on a monthly basis from all companies. The list below is not comprehensive. Cash Burn Cash Balance Revenue Expected Runway Total Funding The Artemis Fund Collected Annual Impact Metrics with a 94% Response Rate Using Visible Aggregating Impact Data into a Report Next, The Artemis Fund aggregated their portfolio data within Visible using the Portfolio Metric Dashboard which provides quick insights such as the total, minimum, maximum, median for any metric. The portfolio-wide metrics Artemis included in their report are Revenue & Capital for SMBs, Number of Families Served, and Number of Jobs created. This year, instead of providing an overview of each company they chose to highlight specific companies in the form of a case study in their impact report. The result is a more digestible yet compelling report that certainly helps LPs and founders understand the type of companies Artemis’ chooses to back. The entire compiled report is 17 slides. The Artemis Fund’s deck is hosted on Visible’s deck feature which allows them to distribute the deck via a shareable link and gives them control over their branding, email gating, password protection and more. View the full impact report here. Visible helps 350+ funds streamline the way they collect and analyze portfolio data.

Watch a recorded conversation with VC Ops experts about improving post-investment operations at your VC firm. Collectively Kristen Ostro from Strut Consulting & Let’s Talk Ops and Lacey Behrens from 01 Advisors have been exposed to operations at dozens of top-tier VC’s. We’ve invited them to share their advice about implementing best-in-class operations at a venture firm. This webinar is designed for anyone looking to improve operations at their Venture Capital firm. Topics Discussed: Tips for working with your fund admin How Lacey runs Portfolio Review Meetings at 01 Advisors How to tailor onboarding for portfolio companies Tools that help improve post-investment operations How to measure whether operational changes are working or not Advice for first-time platform or VC operations hires

VC Head of Platform shares advice on how to plan a founder-focused CEO summit. About Stephanie Rich Stephanie Rich is Head of Platform at Bread and Butter Ventures where she builds scalable networks, resources, tools and knowledge that help their portfolio companies succeed. She spends time working in the Twin Cities startup ecosystem and mentoring founders building in food/ag tech, digital health and enterprise saas. Before working in VC, she gained experience in early-stage marketing and building brands and communities. And she love dogs. You can find Stephanie on LinkedIn and Twitter. Why does your VC firm host CEO Summits and how many have you done? Stephanie: We did our first official Summit in the summer of 2023. We invest all over the country (actually the world!) so we wanted to host a Founders Summit to bring our portfolio together to build connections between founders as well as to meet our network in MN. Our goal for the event was to have everyone leave feeling inspired, motivated and armed with something new -whether a new contact, new resource or new skillset. Is there anything you wish you’d known/realized before your first CEO Summit? Stephanie: I wish I’d thought (and perhaps tested) the space we used a bit more. I’d recommend really thinking about how you’ll utilized Summit locations for big presentations, workshops but also for small moments for founders to connect in small groups. The space was still great, but I think it would have been even better if we’d approached it more thoughtfully. If you had to go back in time and try and convince your investment team to allocate a budget for a CEO summit, what points would you use? Stephanie: I’d focus on the benefits that our founders would get out of summit – connection, inspiration and motivation. Zoom is great but there’s something about getting people together in person that solidifies founder to founder and investor to founder relationships. Check out Visible’s Guide to Portfolio Support Best Practices Download the Guide What costs of a CEO Summit are typically covered by the firm vs founders? Stephanie: Depends primarily on two things – size of the firm and amount of sponsorship dollars raised. At the least, firms should plan to cover all activities and food throughout the event – if you have the budget for it we recommend covering (or at least subsidizing) accommodations and travel. What’s something you’ve tried at a summit that you’d never do again? Stephanie: We did basically all of the planning and prep in-house – it was fun but a ton of lift from our team. Next time I will probably work harder to figure out what different things we could partner on or hire someone to handle – especially when it comes to design and audio-visual skills. What’s something you’ve tried that you’ll make sure to always do in the future? Stephanie: We did a great session where we had one founder briefly interview another in front of the whole group – and we repeated this about 10 times. I was blown away by the amount of research founders did to prep for this – they asked each other insightful, thoughtful questions that really led to all attendees a great window into what each person is building, the journey they’ve taken, and the things they think about every day while running the company. It proved to be super inspirational and led to lots of connections afterward. Any tips to maximize the budget/value add ratio for coordinating a CEO Summit? Stephanie: Spend money on your high-value things – speakers, major dinners/experiences, location – and find ways to deliver on the details in a more budget conscious way. Also be creative when it comes to the city you host in. While there are certainly advantages to hosting in hot spots like San Francisco, New York or Miami, you can save a ton of budget by holding your summit in a city like Minneapolis where buying our restaurants, securing venues and paying for activities requires significantly less investment. Is it worth attempting a virtual summit these days or do you think it needs to be in person? Stephanie: Part of me completely understands the desire for a virtual summit – it’s so much more cost efficient but keep in mind you’re really missing out on the in-person connection and inspiration that make in-person summits so magical. I’d also say a virtual summit is only worth it with extremely stellar and useful content. Make sure you’re giving people a real reason to show up and be very cognizant of the length of event. Visible is founder-friendly portfolio monitoring and reporting for investors. Learn More