MVP Ventures Success Story

Key Results:

• Narrow our focus to our top targets

• Allows for more time spent on outreach and networking

• Allows us to be more efficient as a team, requiring fewer resources

CB Insights Products Mentioned:

• API →
• Financing history →
• Mosaic Score →

The world of venture capital can be extremely competitive. The process of identifying and accessing the best opportunities must be effective and highly efficient.

MVP Ventures’ winning approach combines a machine-human process, allowing us to use data as a focusing lens to signal where and when to prioritize our time building relationships with top founders while better understanding their business.

MVP is establishing a new category for the venture industry – the top-tier co-investor. We only co-invest, we do not lead or take board seats. We invest in exceptional startups alongside the best lead VCs then provide continual, consistent outsized support. Our value comes from our unique full-stack approach to venture capital. We combine platforms for retail investors and high net worth individuals and families, and allow them to invest and lend their talent and networks to founding teams. By the end of 2022, our 10-person team will have made over 60 investments, ranging from $100,000 seed to $10 million Series C deals.

I came to MVP with a background in data analytics and product management. I love how our team comes from a range of different backgrounds – traditional venture, sales, marketing, startups, finance, government, and more. In addition to the typical venture work of talking to founders and performing due diligence on companies of interest, I spend my time building out our proprietary internal deal engine which allows us to identify the best opportunities to pursue.

To Be Data-Driven, You Have to Leverage the Best Data

Before launching MVP I had spent years in the analytics space combining data from various vendors into predictive models and algorithms for a range of use cases. As soon as I started to build out MVP’s technology stack I knew that CB Insights was going to be one of our foundational sources, and it has continued to be one to this day due to the breadth, depth, and accuracy of its data.

There are a couple hundred thousand startup targets in which we could potentially invest, far too many for us to realistically get in touch with or manually do diligence on. We pull data from various sources to feed into our homegrown CRM, which offers suggestions for where to best focus our time based on a range of custom scores and signals.

CB Insights offers valuable features, such as financing history and Mosaic Score. We use funding histories to uncover details about investors, valuations, and patterns of investment, and we also incorporate Mosaic Scores into our internal scoring system. There’s more to what we do than just looking at the platform—it’s about taking the raw data that CB Insights provides and leveraging it based on our own investment thesis to stay ahead of the game.

Adding the Human Touch

As early-stage co-investors, we want to know about investment activity as soon as it happens, so we use the CB Insights API to track new deals. There’s so much noise among data sources, and CB Insights helps us discover whether people know about a company in question—maybe even what they know. If a company isn’t on anyone else’s radar, that’s a useful signal for us, too.

There’s so much noise among data sources, and CB Insights helps us discover whether people know about a company in question.

We always want to improve our accuracy in predicting the best investments, so we constantly incorporate more data. But there’s a difference between being data-driven and relying solely on data, and there’s an art and a science to building the best investment portfolio.

Some firms pursue a data-only strategy, where algorithms determine their investment decisions. That’s not us. Sure, we have (very good!) predictive algorithms, and these algorithms can determine which companies are most likely to have a great exit or raise capital from a top-tier lead investor. But there’s more color to it than that. We look at data and technology as a filter to help humans throughout the decision-making process.

Relying on customizable access to data from CB Insights allows us to spend more time in areas where humans add value—time better spent than gathering data.

Relying on customizable access to data from CB Insights allows us to spend more time in areas where humans add value—such as outreach and networking. In addition to the Mosaic Score contributions to our internal scoring system, we have created alerts to let us know if these scores change so we can act quickly on fresh information.

When you have surface-level information on dozens of companies, you must rely on mass mailings or cold outreach. You hope someone responds within a reasonable period—and even then, it could end up being a waste of time. CB Insights’ data allows us to narrow our focus to our top targets, and from there, we can perform deep due diligence into the sector, company, leadership team, and more before we reach out to discuss a potential investment.

With early-stage companies, much of the data we use to make decisions involves conversations with founders to learn about their background and the nuances of their business. This information isn’t readily available as it is with public companies. Using CB Insights data to narrow the field from the start means we can spend more face-to-face time with founders.

Using CB Insights data to narrow the field from the start means we can spend more face-to-face time with founders.

Most people think the best approach is to use one platform to gather data, but we layer CB Insights with other data sources to capture anything that might fall through the cracks. If you’re looking at a three-month time span, all data sources might have 95% of the same deal information. But we are looking for activity within the past 24 hours, and something might get missed. There’s a layer of trustworthiness, too: If CB Insights and the other sources offer different information, we trust CB Insights because we’ve found it to be the most reliable.

A Way to Optimize Our Resources

We think of CB Insights’ data as a force multiplier. Our team could perform this research on our own, but it would take thousands of hours or a larger team. CB Insights allows us to be far more efficient, so our 10-person team can perform the work of dozens of people.

As a co-investor, part of our thesis involves investing alongside the top partners at the best firm. We often measure our success by who we invest alongside. 88% of our investments have been alongside a Tier 1 lead, and 62% have had a Midas List partner lead the deal.

As much as we want to know about deals that have happened, we are moving toward finding deals that are likely to happen. MVP wants to be first, and CB Insights helps us get there.

As much as we want to know about deals that have happened, we are moving toward finding deals that are likely to happen. The more data we receive—and the more granular and accurate that data is—the better we can identify the best potential deals and get into position to win allocations in the round. MVP wants to be first, and CB Insights helps us get there.