Anyone who has worked in a role related to the public markets has at least heard of Bloomberg Terminal, the industry-standard platform used by professionals to access real-time data and insight into the financial markets.
Indeed, Bloomberg Terminal is an incredibly useful — if expensive — tool for traders, brokers, analysts, and others who care about 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 looking to internalize the information they need to do their due diligence before making a big investment. or monitoring and managing their portfolio through exit.
But this is what French startup Ida is trying to fix, with a platform aimed at helping investors, analysts, chief financial officers (CFOs) and even company founders get the insights they need and tools to collaborate on deals. A little easier.
Investors invest
Edda was initially founded as Kushim VC in 2017, but the company just completed the official rebranding of Edda, while it also announced funding of $5.8 million from a slew of supporters, including the future shape of iPhone co-creator Tony Fadell; Mucker Capital; Plug & Play; FJ Labs; and angel investor Arnaud Bonzom. The new investors are also fully registered members of the EDA platform, as well as 100 other investment firms from 26 countries, including the French public investment bank BPI France.
“Just as Bloomberg changed the way the industry works, Ida will change how investors visualize their funds and manage their business flows and relationships,” FJ Labs founding partner Fabrice Grinda said in a statement. “Venture capital and private equity in general have gone from strength to strength over the last decade, expanding into new sectors and becoming the cornerstone of innovation investment.”
So what does Edda have to offer those working in the private investment space?
“Ida enables secure transparency for anyone managing an investment portfolio, from deal sourcing to due diligence and funding to portfolio management,” Ida Founder and CEO Clement Aglitta told TechCrush.
Those unfamiliar with the inner workings of Glun’s investment empire may be surprised to learn that spreadsheets play a big role in the management of everything—it’s typically a very manual effort, says Aglita, who previously served as chief operating officer in New York. Established investment firm FJ Labs.
“The lack of solutions for private markets is the main reason for establishing Ida,” Aglita said. “Private equity investors currently manage more than $6.5 trillion – but most of these investors rely on tools like Excel spreadsheets to manage their portfolios.
It may be an oversimplification to suggest that investors only use spreadsheets—in fact, they use a variety of tools throughout the entire investment process. This might include Airtable or Salesforce for workflow management, or Affinity, Zaplow, and Sevanta for deal flow (number of investment opportunities). Elsewhere, portfolio management software from EFront and Ipreo have been popular with investors, and both companies have been acquired in various deals totaling more than $3 billion over the past few years.
So Ida has a competition that goes beyond dusty old spreadsheets, but it’s shaping up to be an all-singing, all-dancing tool that covers all the bases.
“We believe the time is right for a unique tool with multiple capabilities to help partners see the big picture,” said Aglitta.
In terms of deal flow, Edda integrates with email inboxes and calendars to support workflow automation with tasks and reminders. It also lays out a clear timeline and position for each potential investment.
Edda’s checklist for payment flow
For existing portfolios, Ida allows investors to record historical valuations for all their companies, perform valuation comparisons and calculate IRR (Internal Rate of Return) for an individual company or for the entire fund. It also helps investors with analytics that show how well their portfolios align with their primary investment focus.
Portfolio performance
Show me the information.
Edda pulls in data from publicly available sources, including Crunchbase and Pitchbook, and has a feature that automatically pulls in additional data from emails, documents, and files in cloud-based storage like Dropbox. And on top of that, Edda has developed an API that tracks all the news related to companies, funds and the deal process.
“All this information and data points are used to create a profile on the company,” Aglita said. “Investment decisions are increasingly driven by multiple data points, so you
You want as much information as possible to make good decisions – that’s what Edda provides.
To illustrate how this all plays out in a real-world setting, Aglita points to the example of an investment fund partner receiving an email about a potential investment opportunity. This partner was using an email plugin provided by Edda, so the platform automatically picked up the company’s name and, after checking if the fund was “already in the pipeline,” matched this with public data from Crunchbase and Pitchbook.
“The deal will be sent directly to the pipeline for the rest of the investment team to start working collaboratively, adding comments, reading documents and e-mails that have already been exchanged with this company,” Aglita said.
Edda then generates a slide for each company in the pipeline, which is reviewed weekly until the investor decides to invest – at which point Edda pushes the company into the portfolio management section and generates key data such as earnings and capitalization tables. . At this time, the founders of the company can be invited to collaborate through Edda, where they can update information themselves and communicate with all the main stakeholders.
And this highlights the core business community management aspect of the Eda platform. It reflects the reality of today’s investment landscape, where investors are putting their money into a number of companies around the world, which requires working with partners (including other investors) and founders of all backgrounds and technical expertise.
“The market is becoming more complex – investors are investing globally, and there are many deep technologies that investors need to be knowledgeable about to make good decisions about where to deploy capital,” Aglita said. “We all know it’s impossible to be an expert in everything, which is why investors are focusing on co-investment opportunities, communicating more with company founders, using the expertise of LPs (limited partners) and so on.”
IDA supports investors by serving as a central gateway to upload documents, update LPS about deals, generate reports, share statistics and more. And portfolio company founders can use Edda to ask questions and seek advice, while investors can request specific updates and new metrics from the founders.
EDA: Sharing performance data with LPs.
Market opportunity
To give you some idea of IDA’s potential, Bloomberg reportedly generates about $10 billion in annual revenue, most of which comes from its professional services division, which is managed by Bloomberg Terminal.
Private equity markets are predicted to grow to $12.5 trillion by 2025, and for many investors that’s a very attractive proposition. Edda, meanwhile, works with investors who currently have $22 billion in assets under management, which gives some indication of how big it could grow.
“This [private] The market is huge and growing – it’s bigger than the public market now,” Aglita said. “There are more companies, the overall valuation is higher, and the amount invested is higher.”
