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Hello, welcome to Stack Genius, the podcast for data driven investment professionals. Today, I have a guest from New York. His name is Elliot, and he's showing us a what I think is really cool product. So I was trying to find comparables or you know how to explain you guys quickly. And there's a company that I really love. They're called clay.com. They do workflow automation for go to market for outbound email campaigns. And I feel you share some of that DNA somehow. So you guys take the big inbox with all the decks, you digest it, make one pagers, I would call it, and then push it into the CRM of choice. Is that halfway true? And how would you describe what you guys are doing? Yeah, no, that's a very good description. Great to be here, Sylvain, by the way. So what we do and the best way to understand it is we automate the top of funnel for investor deal flow. So from the moment a deal comes into an inbox, whether it's multiple deals or one deal at a time, we make it extremely easy and automatic for investors to capture that data format it, and then send it wherever it needs to go. So the CRM being the central tool that most investors use, a popular use case that we have is automatically flowing data that's formatted, neatly organized into the CRM. That sounds like you can automate a lot of or you can save a lot of time. Specifically, if you are an accelerator, a pre-seed, a seed, this could be good for angels, for early stage funds, but even some bigger funds or M&A folks, right? So if you have a lot of stuff that you would need to sift through otherwise, it's super helpful, I assume. Yeah, so today our sweet spot is really from pre-seed to series A, I would say. They have high volumes of deal flow and they need to organize it as automatically and as frictionlessly as possible. Down the line, what we'd like to build on is use our track record with the earlier stage funds to build a product for later stage funds, which will be more quantitative and capture more specific data and figures from the data that they get on companies so that they can have actionable insights from all the data that they see from their deal flow. So everybody who's listening until now still definitely wants to see it. So let's give it a bet. So let's have a little test drive, please. So this is a typical email that an investor would get with deal flow. So the way our product works and the way we make it as easy as possible to ingest this data is we use a Chrome extension here where we capture the data in the email as well as the deck. and we assign it to a company. You can either create new companies here or you can add it to an existing company. So we're going to create a new company here. So I'm going to write in the name here and I'm going to add in the website here, which we both use to create a new dashboard. And what it's going to do is it's going to create a dashboard with the content of this email, as well as publicly available sources. It's going to create a one pager for this company in our system. So the way this is going to look is right here. So you can see it was created a few seconds ago. It has an email and a file. And when we open it, we can see all the data neatly organized and populated from the email, the deck, and the company website, LinkedIn, with our other external sources that we use. That's pretty cool. So that saves you a lot of copy and pasting, actually. Yeah, so this is a lot of manual work that typically is done for some investors and even investors that use Affinity, which populates this already. This gives a more in-depth view of things. And we can see here, for example, the background of the team was populated from LinkedIn, their prior investors here as well. and more data on market as well as the funding that they raised or that they're raising information about the product business model go to market any risks are all generated from the data that was collected on this company so how much of this comes from the deck versus external and how does it deal with conflicting information So it's a blend and what it does is it uses obviously AI plus our algorithms in the backend that we've developed to structure the output so that it makes sense. And we try to blend the data as much as possible using often the most recent data in order to surface and give summaries that are accurate and useful as an output. I definitely like this overview. And so you call it the dashboard, but it's pretty much a one pager. So you have this information here now. And what do you do from here? So from here, you can sync this to any external tool using Zapier. In this case, we've connected it to Airtable. So if this is toggled on, what it's gonna do is it's gonna automatically populate in Airtable all these data fields from the dashboard. And it's gonna allow investors to save a lot of time when you need to enter that manually. So again, a lot of cooking and tasting that you save. So finally those associates can focus more on screening rather than sifting through the inbox. Or even talking to companies and focusing on, on the conversations with founders, uh, instead of having to do a lot of process work. Um, one of the cool aspects that we offer is, uh, anytime notes are taken on calls, which we know investors spend a lot of time talking to invest to other founders and other investors. we automatically capture the data from notes and organize them in the dashboard. So for example, in this case, if the company was raising at a valuation of 20 million and they had an ARR figure of, let's say, 300K, what we would do, and along with any other notes an investor would want to take, we could save these notes and it would automatically populate into the dashboard here. into these fields as well. So we'll give it a few seconds here. There we go. Oh, nice. like that actually so because very often like you say you are finding out more information as you go along but you still want it to be in this in the right place and this also then logically populates downstream into your crm right yes it continually updates uh the field so in this case we can see here these two fields are populated oh i like that and What does it integrate with upstream and downstream? Which type of tools? You briefly said Zapier, but how does that look like? So the best way to describe that is to show what we typically go through onboarding, which is to give an idea of how flexible our tool can be. So again, to reiterate, we fit in between the email part of the deal flow stage and the CRM, and we do everything in between. So for an investor that gets deals via email mostly, they can select this And they can select whichever CRM they have. So let's say this is Affinity. And we give you an idea of how you could use Noticia across your workflow. So in this case, you could forward in emails using this format, or you could use our Chrome extension like we showed in the example before. You can add data on companies in any of these ways. So first you add a company, then you add data on a company. If you have more data like notes or financials or any decks that come after that. And then the last step is exporting this data. So in this case, syncing it to Affinity using Zapier, the same way we synced it to Airtable. What I really like about what you guys have built there It creates instant value, it saves real time, and it is in the right place where AI capabilities currently are, right? So, you know, understanding what's there and putting it somewhere. I wonder how, where this can go as the capabilities of LLMs and similar models grow actually. So maybe another side step. So this saves time to, for whoever would do the manual work currently. So, I mean, is it cheap enough for a single associate to just buy it for themselves or how does it work? Does this have a big contract? How does pricing work generally? Yeah, so we thought about this a lot and we wanted to make it as affordable as possible for any type of fund, regardless of size. And so the way we price ourselves is with regards to usage and volume. becomes a function of how much deal flow an investor sees and we price it accordingly. But we stay relatively, we stay very affordable for funds sizes that are just starting out fund one, raising fund one or even the first close to much, much larger funds who have more budget. Our goal really is to be an add on to the CRM and to not be a burdensome price for emerging managers and anyone that is doing investing in a smaller structure. That sounds really good. And how long have you guys been around? We've been around for two years, so we spent a lot of time figuring out exactly how to tackle this pain point. I come from the banking background where I spent a number of hours sifting through financial data and organizing it so that it can go into the reports that we were building. And that's what got me started in this space. I thought about what tools could be used to automate at least some part of that. So we spent a lot of time figuring out what to build and how to build it. We came across the venture space as being a market that needs better structuring tools because of the volume of deal flow that they see. And with AI being where it is today, it's a very good use case to use it for. I hope it's okay if I say that your product I really like, but your website does not do adjust it. So wherever is turned off by your website right now, this is in May, 2024, still go after this because I think it's a really cool tool, actually. I think it can really help you with your daily operations. What else is there to know about Tessiera or what other people like about you guys? I mean, a very straightforward and nice example is to show maybe how a dashboard gets populated. The way we can do that is, for example, a company that everyone knows, maybe not as early stage anymore, but fits the example here, is creating a dashboard using just the tool itself. In this case, I just typed in the company name. It's asking me which company either from Crunchbase or from URL this fits for. I can even add in a stage. What we're going to do now is it's going to create a dashboard with the data from the public sources, so website, Crunchbase, LinkedIn. And it's going to automatically filter through here as well. So that gives a baseline overview of a company in just a few seconds. What I can see it think I like that. Yeah, yeah, it's it. It captures the data, formats it and organizes it in these sections. One of the things, as I mentioned in the notes, the same way it can capture metrics, it can also capture people or any other data. So for example, in this case, the founder of Notion is called. I've been down so I can write this this way. I can just write it this way and CEO. And what it'll do is as soon as I save this note, it'll capture it in the overview section and it will find the LinkedIn profile for this person as well as retrieve their background from LinkedIn. I really like that because, I mean, it's very, very often the case that you get newer information from your conversations or even in the screening process from how you look at the market and then you want to update. And it's good to have the pre-populated data, but you might want to augment it with more information that you got. Yeah. Essentially, the way investors can think of us is CRMs sometimes do a pretty good job of populating data, Affinity and ADIL being the two main ones in that area. But they still remain in the CRM space. So there's a lot of functions and a lot of data management that they just don't do or don't try to do because it's not their core function. We help bridge that gap. We help populate the things that investors may want to see in their CRM and in their company database that CRMs just don't capture by themselves. Kudos. I think, I mean, at least you won one more fan today. So that's really good. I like what you guys are doing and it seems like you will build many more features that are interesting to people. So I'm super curious where this goes. I mean, maybe in closing, so what's there to know about Noticia and you? So your name is Elliot Benwadi or what was your last name? Elliot Benodiste. So it's a French, Spanish, Moroccan last name, which is essentially where my family comes from. I moved to the U.S. when I was younger, lived in Miami, studied in Montreal, and been living in New York for the past eight years. So then you come from a heritage of good food. The question is, what's your favorite food then in New York? Is there a good Moroccan restaurant? moroccan restaurants there have been a couple uh but i have to say my favorite type of food is really greek food uh my family is from the mediterranean as i mentioned and mediterranean food is really where my weak spot uh where where i really love um so my favorite restaurant in new york for that is a restaurant called kiki's and as a you know true new yorker um waiting for anything or being impatient is really one of our traits. Don't walk like a tourist, right? Exactly. Slow walkers, all that kind of stuff. This is the only restaurant that doesn't take reservations and has a lot of people every time you go. And the only place where I will wait an hour to get a table and have their food. That's really good. So where is it located? What's the name? Kiki's? Kiki's. K-I-K-I. It's located in Lower East Side. And for anyone passing through New York and has, you know, some time because you're going to wait maybe 30, 40 minutes, an hour, definitely go and check it out. I will next time when I'm there. Actually, today I did have Moussaka, but it was in Berlin, Germany. So I feel you for sure. Elliot, this has been amazing. Thank you for spending time with us, showing us what you guys build and also for building it, continuing to do so. I mean, you're here for two years, so I won't say welcome to the industry, but I think definitely that you guys have built something that will add a lot of value to people. so fabulous day i appreciate it thank you sylvan for having me thank you bye now

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