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hello welcome to stack genius the podcast for data-driven investment professional my name is sylvan i'm greeting you from berlin today and also i'm joined by nilo who i think is joining from finland right exactly nice to meet you nice to meet you very cool so you definitely have to excuse my ignorance but you need to help me with your last name so how do i pronounce your last name Yeah, it's pretty out of me. I don't suggest trying it out, but we can go. Thank you. That's very, very honorable of you. Super cool. So we're here to discuss the company that you're building, the product that you have, which looks awesome to me. So I think it's called Inven, right? And it is a sourcing tool that helps, and we can speak about who it helps, but it helps investment professionals to find new deals. So who is it for, the product? Yeah, exactly. So almost all of our customers are using it in some kind of M&A context. So if we're talking of like investment bankers, private equities, industry M&A teams, that's typically the most common use case. But obviously, there's other kind of customer groups like consulting as well, but it's not as common as a very coarse investment bankers, private equities. Ah, interesting. And for how long have you built the product? So how old is the company? Yeah. So we are a startup. We started the company a bit over two years ago. After we kind of had pondered on the idea a few years with ourselves working in investment banking, private equity and consulting. And that's where the kind of idea is coming from. And after kind of pondering on it for a few years, we started the company, raised some VC funding, and now we're really just starting to scale our sales up, which is always exciting. I mean, there are a couple of tools in the market and there were two years ago already. So what was your conviction? Why did you say we can build it cooler? What did you want to focus on? It came down a lot into our own experiences of doing this kind of searches where we just wanted to find all the companies in a very specific niche. And whether we were working in kind of investment banking or consulting at McKinsey, the only way we needed to do it was you download a list of like a thousand companies and then you just start going through them one by one. And there was no kind of better way. And that took like easily a week of work. And that's kind of where the idea comes from this kind of very tedious, long tasks that we had to do ourselves. And just the fact that we can't find a tool that does it. And that's why we kind of thought there's still kind of that niche available for companies where the search actually works really well. Interesting. Well, I mean, obviously, we want to show the goods. So should we have a look and do a test right of the product? Yeah, sure thing. Let's test it out. So what you're seeing here is the kind of product. You input the search terms here on the left, you get the results here on the right. And let's test something out, Silvan. What's interesting for you? Let's find some companies. So I would say that most people are familiar with CRM systems for investment guys. So maybe let's try to look at those companies. sure so what we do here is we just write what we want to be finding i want to find crm software maybe add something like sas in there i want to find crm software sas companies focused on venture capital firms something like this if we want we can add something like a bit of a keyword in there to really help it out but that's not really that necessary even We can then choose the kind of headquarter location and other filters. Let's say we're looking for these companies in the US and Europe. The software works in other countries as well, but most of our customers do European searches here. Now, when we click search, what happens is the AI understands what we're looking for here and uses that to bring this type of companies to the top of our list. Oh, I know all those names already. That's good. Yeah, I'm not that familiar with the space, but are these doing the right thing here? You probably know better than I do. Yes, I mean, that's definitely, no, all of them are relevant that I'm seeing right now. Exactly. And where it really starts saving time and what our customers typically do is they start because their task really is to find me all the companies in SpaceX. What they start doing is they start building their lists here and saving them to a list. And that way they can kind of come back to it and get it easily into an export and so on. And that's kind of it's all focused on the workflow of these kind of investment bankers, private equities, M&A teams. And that's where it really shines. That's very interesting. And what do you think is where do you perform very well or maybe even better than competition? What's your experience with, you know, you must have done a lot of queries and have sentiment from your customers. Yeah, there's really two things where we shine. One is just the fact that this search works better and you can really iterate that a lot. So here, for example, we're doing a CRM software search focused on VC firms. If you want, you can kind of iterate that, hey, I want to find CRM software tools focused on private equities, not VCs. And that kind of nuance really getting into it, no matter how nuanced that is, that's where our tool really shines. The second big part where we typically outperform the competitors is just the breadthness of companies. So if we compare, for example, the tools like PitchBook, they have 3.8 million companies in their database. Well, we have 23 million companies. And what that comes down to is that our database is a lot more focused on those smaller middle market companies. So whenever we have kind of private equities or investment banks that do searches into kind of smaller companies or middle market companies, that's when our tool will perform the best. And when it comes to looking at, you know, data of public companies, I mean, the public companies are here, but we don't have all that specialized data on those, if that makes sense. That does make sense. All right. Super cool. What else is there to know about the interface and the product? Yeah. Well, there's a lot of cool stuff you can do. This is just generally searching for companies. Another common thing that our customers do, they search for buyers. I want to find all the private equities that have a history of investing into a specific space. But one that we're adding also really recently is this kind of deal search where you can show me, hey, I want to find all the acquisitions that have happened in the past 90 days in the CRM space. And we can just write here, I want to find CRM software companies in the past 90 days acquisitions. And we're going to find all of those acquisitions that happen in this space. and get some data on those. So now when we look at the companies, we can start really diving deep with, hey, who has announced what? And then we can also get like, here's the source and that kind of information. And that way get like really interesting data on who has acquired what in the past 90 days or past year or whatever. And that kind of searches is kind of, that's really coming up right now. And that's soon gonna be available for our customers as well. That's actually pretty cool. And what is the legal entities thing up there? Yeah, the legal entity searching here is a very Europe-focused feature. Most of our customers are in the US, but a lot of them are in Europe as well. And in Europe specifically, there's this financial data that's available that's not available in the rest of the world. So this enables searching that financial data. So for example, I want to find UK companies that have an EBITDA between, let's say, 1 and 10 million. And when we search for that, that's exactly what we're going to be getting as well. And this data is very specific on the countries and what they have to report in those countries. But that's a very kind of specific feature for that, if that makes sense. It does, yeah. Thank you. All right. Super cool, actually. I like the user interface. My perception is that you're a tad faster than the other tools that I've seen. I like that. I like that the user interface seems very focused and clean because, you know, it's a work tool, right? So you have to spend a lot of time in there, and so it needs to be ergonomic. So kudos to you guys for building it this way. And how does the contracting with you guys work? Is it long-term contract? Can you do a short description? Is it seats? Help us understand. Yeah, exactly. So what we always do is yearly contracts and then it depends on the team size, how many licenses you want and which features exactly on the pricing. But typically we're talking of something like thousands to tens of thousands a year in terms of the pricing, depending a lot on the team size. We adjust it quite a bit for the team size. So especially kind of one-person teams and that kind of stuff, they do get a different price point than the kind of 10-person teams. And that's something a lot of our customers like there as well, compared to some more traditional databases that have to, you know, minimum three users and minimum 15. Yeah. Okay, so that's cool. So you do single GPs can even use the tool then? Exactly. Single, there's search funds, that kind of stuff for a lot of our customers where there's only one user and they love that fact about it. Super cool. So then maybe help us understand how your customers use you currently. Do they integrate it with other tools with CRMs? Do they manually use the interface or how does it work? Yeah. So if you mind sharing the screen here, actually, you can get the idea there properly. And you can actually see here that some of these firms are in our CRM and you can see the HubSpot logo next to them. So we integrate with CRMs, especially HubSpot and Salesforce, soon integrating with Affinity as well. And that way you can really kind of directly export companies to your CRM and see which companies are already in there. But most of our customers, actually, the way they work is they work within the tool, build the lists, kind of go through these companies, build their lists. And once they've built their list, they go and look at that list from the top right here. And then they can start exporting that list, sharing that with their team members, and then kind of bringing that full comprehensive list in there together. But as we are working in the kind of banking private equity world, a lot of them, what they just do, they just export it to an Excel file and then do their magic after that. Yeah, that happens a lot indeed. So, I mean, now you open it, I have to ask, what is the AI screener that is intriguing? That's a fun feature. So while this search on the left here has been optimized a lot for speed, as you mentioned, it's very fast and you get really quick results, which are really good. The AI screener, that has been optimized for kind of quality of the search purely. So the search on the left goes through our 23 million companies and brings you really high quality results. But this AI screener, that's more like it takes a minute for it to go through 100 results, but it gets an additional level of accuracy in. So what we can do here is please analyze the first 100 search results and add to my project the companies that offer CRM software SaaS tool. We can even add that they should especially not offer consulting but only a CRM tool, something like this. And now when we start the screening, our AI will go through these company websites and other information as well, one by one, and add those companies to our list that fits description and remove the ones that don't. And we can actually see it working here already, kind of it's going through these companies. And if something is not doing exactly that, it kind of saves it to the list or hides it from our list. And that can save a ton of time here. Does that make sense? It does make sense. Is it like an LLM based on text or does it use other data sources than text? Exactly. It's a large language model based on text. That's where you get really the highest quality data there and it's able to really go through that list for you. What we've noticed, I've done some searches with this and a very typical use case, let's say you're looking into something like Once I looked into like hospital lifts, you know, that lift when you're kind of in an elder care home and you have to kind of get out of bed and there's like a lift for that. Very niche. And then the original search was not able to understand the kind of difference between like traditional like industry lifts and then hospital lifts. It wasn't getting that nuanced there. But the AI screen, I understand that the context of, hey, now we really want the kind of hospital focused lifts. And that's where I could run it through like thousands of companies. And then it brought me like the perfect list of 50. And sometimes it can really get that additional level of nuance that's kind of not possible otherwise. I like that. That's super cool. Very tiny button for a very big thing. So I like the modesty about it. It is like that. It's a very cool feature that saves a ton of time. But it's also a thing that the kind of the original search, 90% of the time, the original search is good enough. You don't need it. But then there's really difficult searches sometimes. And that's when it does the magic. super cool i think i already have a good um overview of what you guys do um and again kudos to to what you built it looks cool and it's test rides very cool so let's zoom out a little bit and speak about the industry so so what's your experience being in investec the last two years is it an easy market you know what do you how do you see things play out Well, I'm hoping that it would be an easy market. Unfortunately, it's not. Hopefully, it's getting easier. But there's a lot of interesting stuff happening in this space, especially with kind of AI making everything work a lot better, which makes also kind of a lot of interesting stuff happen. And especially what I'm seeing is kind of, there's a lot of different tools out there and every tool is really good at their kind of own thing. And there's very specialized kind of features. For example, what we do really well is especially with those kind of smaller companies, finding those, we're really good at that and then finding what they really do. But then you have other tools that let's say somebody is really good at public company comparables. really good at finding data on public companies. And that's another use case. And somebody is really good on getting the latest website traffic for all the startups. And everybody has their own thing where they're kind of really the best. And it's kind of very interesting to see how that's going to be integrating into single tools and also kind of how all of those are going to be still separate tools because everybody wants what's the best possible tool out there. So that's the kind of other thing that's happening a lot. So, I mean, consolidation seems like it's logical at some point, but I did not see mergers or even acquisitions in this space that are sizable yet, right? So it's yet to happen. Exactly. Not major things, but small things are happening in the kind of space. I think Delphi was acquired by Intap recently. That is true. Another kind of Valuate acquired another company in Europe and that kind of thing. Small acquisitions are happening, but lately nothing kind of major from the kind of big players like PitchBook and that kind of stuff. Obviously, they're acquiring companies, but not in this sourcing specifically yet. Oh, yeah. Thanks for sharing that. And I also think there is a new layer of companies now that add even more utility through, you know, Gen AI and LLMs. It's early days still, but I can definitely see improvements in efficiency for investment teams happening. All right, nice. So, I mean, maybe then in almost closing, what is there to know about Finland? So where is it on the map? So help us ignorant people. And what's the most favorite dish that everybody loves in Finland? There's kind of, I'd say there's, first of all, Finland in Europe, in the Nordic countries, a lot of very cold areas and hopefully getting kind of closer to summer now. In terms of the dish, what everybody loves in Finland, I at least personally think it's the best. It's kind of like... It's like... How do I say it? It's not loved by everybody. But it's loved by me. It's this kind of... late night nakki kioski i don't know what to call it like a late night sausage uh random shop it's not good quality at all but it's really good uh so is it more like a hot dog or is it more like a german kind of like a yeah kind of like a hot dog but its own style there uh that that's at least what i like but it's not for everybody it's more like a Colossal to McDonald's, then I like a really good food. Very good. You have to give me the link to your favorite shop. I will put it in the show notes. Very cool. Most of the team is here in Finland, but we have a very global team as well. So part of the team is in New York, especially sales and that kind of thing. I like New York pizza, so they have really good pizza over there. So awesome, Nilo. Thanks for spending time with us, showing us the goods. My fingers are crossed for big successes, and my heart goes out to Finland. Thank you. Take care. Bye now.

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