Background
A San Francisco multi-stage venture firm built its edge on thesis-driven investing. Its tooling, though, was category-driven. The firm paid for multiple investment databases and still kept missing emerging disruptors, because no filter answers a question like "who is solving supply chain waste in agriculture?"
The same gap showed up in M&A work for portfolio companies: niche acquisition targets assembled by hand, over days, with plenty of room for oversight.
What the firm needed:
Search by problem, not by category
Surface the early-stage disruptors and under-the-radar targets databases miss
Automate the research grind, with results flowing straight into the CRM
The Challenge
The firm's theses started with problems: who is solving this? Their databases only answered categories: who is tagged that? The space between those two questions was filled with analyst time. Days of sifting produced half-decent market maps that missed smaller players, M&A target lists were built by hand and prone to oversight, and emerging disruptors slipped through because no filter described them yet.
The Solution
Raylu gave the firm thesis-first sourcing: describe the mandate in plain language, and the market map comes back scored and CRM-ready.
Thesis-first search. Type the mandate the way you'd say it: "early-stage companies solving supply chain waste in agriculture." Raylu surfaces the companies behind the problem, not just the ones behind the tag.
Ranking tuned to the mandate. Every lead is automatically scored against the firm's criteria, so the team starts each map at the names most worth their time.
CRM in the loop. Raylu pulls in supplementary data and pushes structured insights back into the firm's existing systems. No new workflow to learn.
We used to spend entire days sifting through data to build a half-decent market map that missed a lot of smaller players. Now Raylu handles it all in minutes, and we show up to meetings with insights that blow founders away.
- VP, SF-Based Multi-Stage VC Firm
The Results
Opportunity pipeline
To build a market map
More leads per search
Twice the pipeline
Thesis-first search uncovers 2 to 2.5x more relevant, qualified companies than the firm's manual process ever did, including the smaller players the filters always missed.
Market maps in minutes
What took 10+ hours of sifting now takes about five minutes, so the team can test a thesis the moment it forms instead of rationing research time.
An edge founders can feel
The team walks into first meetings already fluent in the company, its market, and its competitors. In a competitive round, that fluency wins allocations.
Net effect: more theses tested, more hidden companies found, and a firm that shows up first with the sharpest map in the room.