Anyone who has worked in a role even tangentially connected to the public markets has at least heard of Bloomberg terminalan industry standard platform used by professionals to obtain real-time data and insights into the financial markets.
Bloomberg Terminal is indeed an incredibly useful – albeit expensive – tool for traders, brokers, analysts and others concerned with the public markets. But those more attuned to the private sphere, such as venture capitalists and private equity investors, may not be as well served when it comes to siphoning the data they need to conduct their due diligence prior to doing a business. major investment, or tracking and managing their portfolio until an exit.
But this is something that French startup edda is looking for a solution, with a platform designed to help investors, analysts, chief financial officers (CFOs) and even company founders get the insights they need, and the tools that make collaborating on deals just that little bit more make easier.
Investors invest
Edda was initially founded as Kushim VC back in 2017, but the company has just completed its official rebrand to Edda, while also announcing $5.8 million in funding from a slew of backers, including iPhone co-creator Tony Fadell’s Future Shape; Mucker Capital; Plug&Play; FJ labs; and angel investor Arnaud Bonzom. The new investors are also fully registered members of the Edda platform, as well as some 100 other investment firms in 26 countries, including the French public investment bank BPI France.
“Just as Bloomberg changed an industry’s ability to operate, Edda will change the way investors visualize their fund and manage their deal flow and relationships,” FJ Labs founder Fabrice Grinda said in a statement. “Venture capital and private equity in general have been gaining strength over the past decade, spreading into new sectors and becoming the cornerstone of innovation investment.”
So what exactly does Edda give to those who work in the private investment space?
“Edda brings secure transparency to anyone managing an investment portfolio, from deal sourcing to due diligence and financing to portfolio management,” Edda co-founder and CEO Clément Aglietta told ukbusinessupdates.com.
Those unfamiliar with the inner workings of the private investment realm may be surprised to learn that spreadsheets play an inordinate role in managing everything — it’s typically a very manual business according to Aglietta, who previously held his trade as chief of staff in New York-based investment firm FJ Labs.
“The lack of solutions for the private markets was the main reason I founded Edda,” said Aglietta. “Private equity investors currently manage more than $6.5 trillion, but the majority of these investors still rely on tools like Excel spreadsheets to manage their portfolios.”
It might be a little too simplistic to suggest that investors just use spreadsheets – in reality, they use a range of tools throughout the investment process. This can be Airtable or Salesforce for workflow management, or Affinity, Zaplooand Sevanta for deal flow (the number of potential investment opportunities). Elsewhere, portfolio management software from EFront and Ipreo have proved popular among investors, with both companies acquired in separate offers for a combined total of more than $3 billion in recent years.
So Edda already has some competition outside of dusty old spreadsheets, but what it throws is an all-singing, all-dancing tool that covers all bases.
“We believe it’s time for funds to have a special tool with multiple capabilities that helps partners see the big picture, doing everything they need,” Aglietta said.
In terms of deal flow, Edda integrates with email inboxes and calendars to support workflow automation with tasks and reminders. It also describes a clear schedule and layout for what stage each potential investment is in via a dedicated watchlist.
Edda watchlist for deal flow
For the existing wallet, Edda allows investors to record historical valuations for all of their companies, perform valuation comparisons and calculate IRR (internal returns) on an individual company basis or for the entire fund. It also serves investors with analytics that show how well their portfolio is aligned with their main investment focus.
Portfolio performance
Show me the details
Edda pulls in data from publicly available sources, including Crunchbase and Pitchbook, while also including a feature that automatically pulls additional data from emails, documents, and files stored in cloud-based repositories such as Dropbox. And on top of that, Edda has also developed an API that tracks news about companies, funds, and anything related to deal making.
“All of this information and data points are then used to generate a profile about the company,” Aglietta said. “Investment decisions are increasingly driven by multiple data points, so you
need as much information as possible to make sure you make good decisions – this is what Edda offers.”
To illustrate how this might all play out in a realistic scenario, Aglietta highlighted an example involving an investment fund partner who received an email about a potential investment opportunity. Since this partner used an email plugin from Edda, the platform automatically captured the company’s name and checked if it was “already in the pipeline” with the fund, then synced it with public information from Crunchbase and Pitchbook .
“The deal is automatically sent to the pipeline for the rest of the investment team to work on it together, adding comments, reading the documents and emails already exchanged with this company,” said Aglietta.
Edda then generates a slide for each company in the pipeline, which is reviewed weekly until the investor decides to invest. uppercase table. At this point, the company founders can be invited to collaborate through Edda, where they can update information themselves and communicate with all key stakeholders.
And this highlights the most important facet of the Edda platform’s business community management. It reflects the reality of the current investment landscape, where financiers can put their money into any number of companies around the world, requiring them to work with partners (including other investors) and founders of all backgrounds and levels of technical expertise.
“The market is becoming more complex – investors are investing globally and there are more and more in-depth technologies that investors need to know about to make good decisions about where to put capital,” Aglietta said. “We all know it’s not possible to be an expert in everything, so investors are very focused on co-investing opportunities, communicating more with company founders, leveraging the expertise of the LPs (limited partners), and so on.”
Edda supports this by serving as a central channel for investors to upload documents, keep LPs up to date on deals, generate reports, share stats and more. And portfolio company founders can use Edda to ask questions and seek advice, while investors can request specific updates and new stats from the founders.
Edda: Sharing performance data with LPs
Market opportunities
To give an idea of the potential for Edda, Bloomberg reportedly generates about $10 billion in annual revenuethe vast majority of which apparently stems from its Bloomberg Terminal-driven Professional Services division.
Private equity markets are expected to grow to $12.5 trillion by 2025, and for many investors it is a much more attractive proposition. Edda, for its part, is currently working with investors with just $22 billion in assets under management, giving an indication of how much further it could grow.
“This one [private] market is huge and booming – it is now bigger than the public market,” said Aglietta. “There are more companies, the total valuation is higher and the amount invested is also higher.”
