Why we built our own VC platform at OneRagtime?
At OneRagtime, we’ve always had this vision to build a venture capital fund that scales. This is why since we started in 2017, 30% of our team (developers, product, UI/UX, and data scientists) is working full-time in tech to scale our investment capabilities.
In this article, we’ll dive deep into our 3 products to understand how we implemented technology at OneRagtime:
- The platform for investors and startups
- The deepdive to enhance data
- The core for our business team
1. The platform
We built our platform model on the conviction that if we invest in tech, we must apply it to ourselves first. Our internal tools are proprietary. The entire investment process is digitalized on the OneRagtime platform, with 24h/7 access to our club deal and funds, documentation & portfolio visualization:
OneRagtime gives our exclusive community of +250 investors access to investment opportunities, portfolios & reporting seamlessly. When they are on our platform, they have access to the current and past deal flow of OneRagtime. Each opportunity includes a complete investment teaser and also a detailed deep analysis created by the OneRagtime investment team. Users can also understand all the financial information of the round such as the total fundraising, pre- & post-money valuation, etc. Our investors can directly invest through the platform. Once the subscription agreement is signed and the cash call is done, the investments are confirmed in the portfolio and they start receiving reports.
After the investments, our investment team prepares a detailed quarterly report for each of our portfolio companies. The report reviews all activities, technology, and team development, as well as financial data and key performance indicators. Our investors have direct online access to quarterly reports and an overview of their portfolio, as well as the revaluation of their portfolio, including TVPI and DPI. The portfolio is evaluated periodically for the club deal and by semester for the funds.
2. The DeepDive
If you've been following the evolution of the venture capital industry, you may have heard the term ‘data-driven venture capital’, or ‘augmented VC’. This refers to a new way of investing approach that VCs have traditionally used. Only a roster of VCs is now data-driven because many of them face significant challenges in adopting these new technologies, including bandwidth, or resource allocation.
At OneRagtime, we believe that the future of venture capital will be driven by smart software, empowered by artificial intelligence. And we spent the last 2 years building our in-house algorithms. The benefits are obvious: if you can accurately source and track companies and founders that fit your thesis with the help of AI, then you are already making better use of your time. Our in-house tool, known as the ‘DeepDive’, mainly allows us to leverage our deal sourcing activity by drastically increasing the volume of startups that the team can source and analyze, and only select the companies that our team should look at with our ranking tool.
This data empowers our team to make faster, better, and more informed decisions. With our tool, we can now sort through many more startups and direct the team to the ones we consider the most promising. Thus increasing our chances of meeting with the best potential teams early on. The process isn't perfect yet for us. Still, as we leverage more data into our processes, we will be able to identify faster new companies, founders, and teams, as well as shifts and trends in the market.
In the future, we are already working on our new product: the pitch deck analysis. Thanks to advances in NLP (Natural Language Processing), we can automatically extract information from the pitch deck files that companies send us (e.g. founding team, market, competitors, etc.) and turn it into informative insights and useful knowledge for our investment and deal flow team. This also has the advantage of leveraging big data to understand general metrics about a market, with the added benefit of having access to a lot of data that would otherwise be unavailable on the internet.
3. The core
To complete the platform, we have created an internal back-end CRM tool to scale our operations:
- Investors & Investments CRM: We created all the infrastructure to follow the investor's account, investment entities, and participations.
- Automatic KYC: To facilitate the investment process, we developed a back office process for the KYC.
- Subscription Agreement: We have built a powerful S.A. generation tool to automatically generate the S.A. with the information of an investor and send it for electronic signature.
- And way more such as a data dashboard, automatic cap tables, etc.
Our internal back-end has allowed us to support our investor relations, finance, and legal teams with the management of 50 investment vehicles (aka SPVs), which has been a key factor in the acceleration success of OneRagtime. This will allow us to scale on new asset classes and geographies in the long run.
To conclude, we see many digital platforms for club deals popping up these days. However, despite all advantages tech can build, our best asset since day 1 has been our team, our community, and our ability to spot great projects before others with our presence on the ground and helping our entrepreneurs with our network and unfair advantages.
Contact our team to join the OneRagtime ride,
Best,
The OneRagteam
