For years, many VCs have used a mix of spreadsheets and email to manage their investments. Despite the fact that technology represents 78% of venture capital investments, VCs themselves are stuck in the dark ages. The future of investing involves greater deal flow and requires better real-time tools to help private market investors make better deal flow decisions.

Here are 5️⃣ must-have tools and features for private equity investors:

1. Source High-Quality Deal Flow

VCs need a tool to help bring high-quality deals into their deal flow funnel. Deal flow is usually not quantified and based solely on your network & friends.

This is great if you have a strong existing network and have co-invested in the past or happen to be invited to “the poker game”. But what about emerging managers and investors who are new to the scene? When you get your hands on actual quantified deal flow, how do you handle it?

With fiifi, we quantify your deal flow based on your investment profile. Your Diligence tab includes your current and past deal flow in addition to companies you may be interested in. Want a warm intro to a new company? We connect with your social networks to show you know who to reach out to.

Track Referrals

Use your CRM, spreadsheet, or a tool like Airtable to quantify your deal flow and track referrals. Share and receive deals from scouts, venture partners, and those in your network with deal flow.

Use a tool so you can 1) record who it was 2) track when the deal flow was shared and 3) follow up to see if they invested or not, and what deals they are looking at now. Easily share companies with colleagues on fiifi and track actions made on your referrals.

2. Due Diligence

Every team has its own flow for doing diligence; the trick is to take that flow and put it in a trusted source that is mobile, easy to update, and shareable. Customize your diligence workflow and automatically find everything you need on a company using fiifi.

Checklists & To-do’s

We are all responsible for keeping deals on track and on time, especially when it comes to legalese and deal docs. Winning or losing a deal can be all about timing, timing is efficiency. 

Maintaining conversations and details to the deal starting with the deal memo can be difficult. Using tools like Trello are great, but then you are constantly reconciling data across multiple pieces of software.

fiifi has tools that automatically set alarms and warnings so that you and your team stay on the same page and move at a reliable, fast pace. Create conversations around the deal and magically collect deal docs, pitch decks, and everything that has to do with the target company through your native email. Never miss startups’ terms or pitch decks, and keep important documents from getting buried in your email.

3. Track & Analyze Investments

Tracking and consistently analyzing your investments is one of the key ways to balance your portfolio and understand how you and your team want to make future investments. Be the value-add investor you want to be and monitor your portfolio with our dynamic charts & graphs.

Look at the granular performance of your startups as well as your portfolio as a whole. Understand your existing portfolio — what sectors, stages, geographies are performing well? Where can you bring more balance to your private equity investments? What is the gender balance of CEOs and founders in your fund?

4. Compare & Parse Documents

Looking back and referencing your deal docs, LPAs, and past notes are important to a healthy GP and fund. This is something you need to keep up to speed for your QBRs and annual reports to LPs.

One way to accomplish this is with a tool like our document parser that reads your documents for you. We bring the key economics front and center to help you see the deal details quickly and easily. You want to sound like a pro when your LP calls and asks for a reminder of the deal terms, or when you want to reference terms of an investment in the past to see how they compare to today's deals.

5. Fund Management Like a Boss

Modeling your fund can be both exciting and daunting. Showing what your fund will look like before your first close is a challenge. Understanding what has closed and what is soft circled can be like herding cats.

Fund managers need a simple tool to automate their distributions, capital calls, recycling, and fees so that you know how many follow on rounds you can make and if you have enough at the end of the year for taxes.

Pick tools that help you to stay on top of your fund dynamics, that way you don’t have to rely on your back office to tell you how to run your fund. With fiifi, simply enter your LP details and we’ll run the numbers for you.