InnoVenture Description

Who are our customers, what is their problem thats difficult expensive or inconvenient? Today DCs customers are investment banks, financial sponsors, strategic investors and lenders. The customer base will expand to include additional constituents as discussed. In our first year, we registered 2500 firms on the platform with over 4500 users total. Participants in the investment banking and M&A industry have struggled for decades to find software solutions that fit their needs. The process investment banks (IBs) undertake to execute transactions is complicated, time consuming & manual. Financial buyers, corporate buyers and lenders face similar challenges in sourcing new investments, managing portfolio companies & fundraising. Over 36% of the market still uses Excel/Outlook exclusively, while 50% of firms are planning to change/improve processes for sourcing/fundraising. Today, the industry is supported by several siloed database & information solutions that are internally facing & require expensive customization. Significant overhead is required to manually update the legacy technology that becomes outdated when left unattended.

What is the vision large enough to attract the resources to accomplish it? DC brings ease and efficiency to this market by combining today's siloed process solutions with pre-built industry-specific workflows that support a sophisticated M&A or capital raising process. DC seamlessly connects investment bankers with relevant financial sponsors, strategic investors and lenders, and helps them to efficiently manage todays cumbersome process in a secure, social platform. DC's freemium offering is complemented by a suite of premium subscription products that further enhance the process and user experience. The platform includes a proprietary deal matching algorithm for targeting and managing investors, networking functionality and a social database of real-time, self-reported information and acquisition criteria. DC directly addresses the pain points experienced by our target market. Our buyer/lender users already experience significant efficiency gains and we project 15-40% reduction in overhead per IB.

What is the whole product solution necessary to totally satisfy the customers? While we are live, like all software products ours is in constant development. We currently have all the necessary workflow pieces in place that keep all the communication lines open between investors and the advisors leading transactions. The whole product solution, however, will need to have a larger reporting and analysis side to it. As a platform, an investment banker can already successfully host his entire transaction in DealCloud and move all the buyer parties through due diligence. In order to provide them greater value than the way the process is handled traditionally, we need to have analysis on opened documents, workflow stages, milestone reports, etc. This is something that no technology solution is providing the industry with to date. Our development on this front is already underway, but until it is tested and rolled out, it remains as the piece of the puzzle that will boost the value to unprecedented levels.

What are the milestones necessary to create that solution?

We need to redesign the Deal Room that we are currently using to allow for the flexibility mentioned above. We need to allow for guest access just to Deal Rooms (instead of the whole platform) to allow for constituencies that are not currently supported based on DealClouds user types. This will allow everything to exist under one login. We also need to figure out how to monetize the Deal Room from the investor side. We have some ideas of revenue driving features, but as the Deal Room gets reworked from the Investment Banking side we will need to redesign how it looks from the investor/lender side.

Who is the leadership with a successful track record of having done that before? Ben Harrison (President, FT): Career in private equity & investment banking. Previously with PE Firm Falfurrias Capital & IBs Edgeview Partners and Harris Williams. Rob Cummings (Co-Founder, PT): CTO & Operating Partner at Falfurrias Capital. Member of the executive team that launched YOUcentric and grew the business through a series of acquisitions before being acquired by Oracle. Held executive positions at software businesses Chordiant (VP of Global Field Ops.) and MobileHWY (President). Rob and Ben have been friends and colleagues for 3.5 years. They worked together at private equity firm Falfurrias Capital. Their unique combination of industry expertise, enterprise software experience, and expansive networks of startup, software, and industry professionals were the key ingredients that led us to launch the business and build our unique platform. Ed McMahan (Co-Founder & Advisor): Current Partner at Falfurrias Capital. 15 years of PE and IB experience. Previously with Chicago Growth Partners & Bowles Hollowell. MBA from Kellogg. Marc Oken (Investor & Advisor): Managing Partner at Falfurrias Capital. Former CFO of Bank of America & Partner at PriceWaterhouseCoopers. Hugh McColl Jr. (Investor & Advisor): Former Chairman & CEO, Bank of America. Rajkmar Rajput (Chief Architect, FT); Lucy Barber (VP Marketing, FT); Savan Patel (Engineer, FT), Ashish Rajguru (Engineer, FT).

What resources are required and where will they come from? Increase direct sales staff It would help for our programming/development to speed up with the addition of one or two more developers Marketing campaigns