DotAlign is fairly uniquely positioned. It provides you a social graph of all your colleagues but data never leaves your firm. This makes it perfectly suited for CRMs that do not have a social graph feature and/or organizations that have hard data protection requirements. Automated Relationship Insights:DotAlign provides a clear list of people and companies that a team interacts with, assigning a relationship strength score to each. This helps users understand their network's depth and identify key connections. Intelligent Automation:The platform eliminates the need for manual data entry and keeps contact information up to date. This automation extends to entity alignment, de-duplication, and analysis of signature blocks for contact information extraction. Secure and Collaborative Environment:Built with top-grade security, DotAlign ensures that all data remains within the enterprise's network. Access is controlled by the enterprise's Azure Active Directory, and no external parties, including DotAlign, Inc., have access to this data. Privacy and Compliance:The platform prioritizes privacy and is designed to be compliant with data protection regulations like GDPR and CCPA. Enterprises have control at every level, and all data is encrypted both at rest and in motion. API First and CRM Integration Friendly:DotAlign integrates seamlessly with various tools such as Salesforce, LinkedIn, Outlook, and can be accessed via an API for other enterprise applications. This ensures data and functionality are available where users need them. Relationship Strength Scores:The platform scores relationships based on interaction data, recency, and contact responsiveness, highlighting the most significant connections for the firm. Lead Analysis and Key Influencers Identification:DotAlign enables users to analyze leads and understand which companies or contacts they should prioritize for outreach. Data Analysis for Business Development:The software supports business development efforts by providing insights into the most promising leads and connections. Snowflake and SQL Server Sync:DotAlign offers the ability to populate relationship data into Snowflake instances for advanced analytics or into a Microsoft SQL Server for in-house reporting and cross-referencing. Market Data Integration:The platform provides comprehensive and up-to-date public information about people and companies in the user's network. Customizable Sharing and Privacy Settings:Enterprises and individual users can set their preferences for what data is shared and kept private. Target Audience:DotAlign is designed for various enterprises looking to leverage their relationship networks for business development, recruitment, operational efficiency, and more. Pricing Model:The pricing is based on the number of mailboxes being analyzed, with different tiers for different mailbox quantities. Customer Base:DotAlign's clients include well-known firms like Houlihan Lokey and Cowen, showcasing its reliability and effectiveness in supercharging relationship intelligence in significant financial and consulting sectors.DotAlign positions itself as a sophisticated, secure, and intelligent tool for enhancing relationship intelligence and operational efficiency in various business contexts. Its focus on automation, security, privacy, and integration with existing enterprise tools makes it a valuable asset for organizations looking to leverage their network effectively. Timestamps of Video Interview00:00 Intro00:41 What is DotAlign?04:02 Relationship Intelligence Reports06:43 Data Protection and Entity Matching08:54 DotAlign User Interface10:18 Relationship Strength Indicators11:29 Automation With Manual Override12:44 Office365 and Google Workspace13:14 Protected Conversations14:38 Linkedin and Salesforce Sidebar15:06 Integrate with any CRM15:54 API Integration17:02 Creating a Social Graph Export19:10 Outro AI Transcript of Video Interview "Hello, welcome to Stack Genius, the podcast for all data-driven investment professionals. My name is Silvan, and I greet you wherever you are in the world right now. And also, I'm greeting Vin Scafaria from DotterLine. How are you doing today? Great. Thanks so much for having me. Very good. So you're joining from New York or where are you from? Yeah, that's right. New York. Oh, perfect. Yeah, I was trying in preparation of this, I was trying to, you know, find a nutshell version of what DotAlign does. And I don't know the story of your brand, but DotAlign seems like you're aligning the dots and that seems like exactly what your product is. Sure. If I would describe it with my own words, there's this feature in LinkedIn that tells you how you are connected to someone. So how can you get an introduction? And my understanding, my layman's understanding is that you do this on steroids and on premise. Is that roughly correct? That's really perfect. Yeah. And I think a big feature is that the understanding of relationships that the colleagues then have is via automatic communication. data intelligence and with a lot of control over privacy and sharing. And so the net result is, sure, on my LinkedIn, I might see someone who you met at a conference way back when, but via dotted line, I can understand which colleagues have really strong relationships to best open doors. and simultaneously also build a collective understanding of all the people, all the companies that we've had touchpoints with, whether by email, by calendar, if someone's LinkedIn. And usually that's thought of as either LinkedIn's job or CRM's job, and CRM meanwhile is usually manual. So the automated picture that the colleagues gain is a big part of our value prop. So if I'm listening correctly, you would integrate with an existing CRM that does not yet have such a functionality and downstream things like portfolio management are also not your turf. So you specialize in partnering with CRM systems then, is that right? Yes, absolutely. What's interesting is that there's such a range of how different firms use CRMs and also their degree of sophistication and how much they want to be able to do in-house in terms of the analytics and running reports that really combine multiple different realms. It's kind of CRM is one area, market data, who are the interesting people out there in the world is another area. and then just gluing it all together with an automatic understanding of who's actually talking with whom, who has strong relationships where, whether or not captured manually in the CRM. And so you could sit as a sidebar within, DotAlign could sit as a sidebar within your CRM. We could sit as a sidebar within LinkedIn. We can run standalone. Some of our clients just run DotAlign standalone and other clients, you know, are very heavily focused on having DotAlign as a data source that they then use to, um, kind of layer against the CRM and say, well, these are your tier A accounts that you said you'd be frequently in touch with. And how's activity going? And is there a future meeting on the calendar? So it's kind of a blend. And again, not every firm has kind of nailed CRM. I think especially larger firms, more secure firms that need to worry about I guess I'd say some of the CRMs that are most user friendly are also not necessarily as enterprise ready for, you know, a lot of PEVC professionals come from places like investment banking. That's where I started my career. And, you know, some of those more full service CRMs, so to speak, though they're full service in some ways, but they don't seem to have automated relationship intelligence. And so we're helping complete that story. Can you maybe paint some more of a picture by maybe even showing things when you say automated intelligence? What does it mean? How does it feel like? Who does what, where, and what comes out? Yeah. So, and I'll be demoing this in a little while, but basically the way this works is a firm says, we want the left hand to know what the right hand is doing. We want to be able to help portfolio companies at scale where a port co head of sales says, for example, we're trying to crack the Amlaw 500. These are those 500. Where can you help? And rather than feeling like you're imposing when you call your VC and ask for more than five names, you can send 500 companies and the liaison of the portfolio company can then say, let me run a report. And within a couple seconds, it'll spit out a report that tells that person at the VC, here are the easiest ways that I can be helpful. These are 10 introductions I could make via a partner here at my VC firm, you know, and two key points of contact. And so like, that's an example of, you know, where some of those partners, they might just have really strong relationships. They're not necessarily working that deal right now. But lo and behold, I know that CFO from back in my days when I worked in banking. And so the way that that particular experience would feel is from the port co-exec's perspective, they send an email and they get back a, hey, here are 10 intros where we can help you. From the VC who's helping's perspective, they go in, they run a quick report. And then there are other people, let's say your use case is I'm hunting for deals. I have interesting deal ideas or I'm spending all day in LinkedIn, I have this little side caddy to LinkedIn that knows about my firm and it knows deep data about my firm. And it can know that we actually met with those folks, you know, three months ago and specifically Sylvain did. And, you know, these are our top five relationships. And normally I might say, okay, well, you know, who are the colleagues that are in the CRM? But I wouldn't necessarily know who knows them well, who has a strong relationship. And it does that through mailbox scraping, but that's on premise, which is the important data protection element, right? That's right. So, you know, the primary data sources that we're drawing upon are, you know, mailbox data. So email and calendar and contact cards. There's also the ability to upload LinkedIn on behalf of your, you know, you can export your first degree LinkedIn connections to a CSV. You can upload that for yourself or on behalf of, let's say, your boss. Okay. And that's the primary corpus of activity. And it'll go back, you know, it'll go back several years for calendar, a couple of years for mail, whatever you set it to do. And then it'll automatically line up like is Vince Scafaria, the guy who worked at FactSet, the same person as Vincent Scafaria, you know, using this Gmail or this dottedline.com email address. Which is not trivial, by the way. Not trivial. So it does that automatically. And if I have your mobile phone number, Or if you have my mobile phone number, I'll keep the example the same via, let's say, my Gmail. Well, this guy, Vince Scafaria, is coalesced to be a single human across those identifiers automatically. And it's bubbled up. This is the best job title that we know of. This is the best and most recent phone number. And here's its timestamp of how we're quite sure it's a good phone number. And so normally that's thought of as kind of a care and feeding of the CRM operation, right? You end up with duplicates, you've got to dedupe them. You've got to, you know, worry about contact cards getting stale. Most of our customers kind of relax a lot about managing contact cards because someone has probably been emailed that person's new information or or has their data via LinkedIn. We also, by the way, do subscribe to a certain amount of market data. So there's a firm called People Data Labs, and we bundle a subscription to a certain amount of credits of data along with. So when you're looking at a company or a person, loves fly fishing, and they're in Topeka, Kansas, and these other kinds of data that are known that didn't necessarily come from the mailbox analytics. That's fascinating. So, I mean, we're halfway in. Let's show me the goods. Okay, great. So I guess my screen's already shared, so... Yes. And here we go. Now you're on stage. The caveat here is that for this demo, this is my actual data line. And so what I've done is I've kind of jumbled the names. So you'll be wondering who's named SJ with Xs, right? These are fake names, but there's kind of real companies underlying. There are a couple of companies where we have the ability to use Logo. And I'll feature some of that in a moment. So actually, let me start there. So Cowan's an example of a client of ours. And what you're able to see at a glance is, who are the key introducers? How strong are those relationships? So this is me and my colleagues. So this is the dotted line user interface right now, right? Yes. So we're looking at the dotted line user interface. We're looking at me and my colleagues and how well we know a particular company. Check. Okay. And so we're able to see things like, you know, if you were yet another colleague of mine, you would say, oh, well, if I was trying to reach out to Cowan. I probably wouldn't be asking these folks. I'd be asking Vince and Jesperi. These are several easy ways to get in the door. And so I'm going to talk about this relationship strength aspect in a moment. So what you have here is a set of, in this case, it's the companies that my colleagues and I know, relationship strength scores, recent meetings, key introducer, key contact, this sort of thing, yes? Yes. And so I can look for a particular company and again, you know, names being jumbled, but so I can look for a particular company and it'll bring up a sidebar showing the kind of data, be able to jump in if I want to focus a deep dive on that particular company. And I can see, like, this is an example of oftentimes companies go by multiple different names, multiple different URLs, right? And so that's been automatically aligned. I could focus on the contacts and for each contact, I've got things like their, you know, key touchpoint level data is things like, you know, so when have we had recent interactions, are there future meetings on the calendar? And actually in the non-obfuscated mode, it would say via whom. So you get a sense for what is our engagement with this company and with these individual people? What are their phone numbers? How sure are we that this is a good phone number or a good email address? Um, everything is timestamped and there's no manual input required. You can do certain things manually. Like if I wanted to take one particular company and I realized that there's been a merger and just suppose that they, you know, merged with, um, another firm. Uh, yeah. You know, so I can, I can hit merge and it it's basically allowing for automation with a manual override. And so that way, the system just automatically understands what's going on. And the key to this is that no data left the firm. So when you mentioned earlier, I on premises, and I ended up not diving into that point, quite yet, I want to come back to that. This is, this would be, for example, you know, dot align dot, you know, you know, VC firm.com, for example. And so it's running at the firm and no data comes to us. So there are some other systems where there's kind of an onboarding step and you need to trust the software vendor with access to your mailbox. That's not the case here. This is using Office 365. We do have a Google Workspace coming, but it's not yet in the market. So this is for Office 365 clients. And The setup is extremely easy and it is on-prem. Updates are automatic, et cetera. But I guess we're mainly here in the demo. So let me just see if there's a couple other demo features I'd love to show, but I'm going to pause there for you. No, no. I love it. I think I understand. The one thing I wanted to ask is, so you will see the interactions your colleagues had with that account or person, but you won't see the details, right? Thank you so much. Yes. It's only the dates. And really, frankly, by default, it's only the first and last date. And you get a relationship strength score. which is, which I'll talk about in a moment, but never content. So colleagues are not seeing each other's, you know, actual email content. In fact, it's never even stored. What we are doing is things like signature block parsing, and then the rest of the message is discarded. But, you know, so if it says regards Vince Cafaria, my, my phone number that is captured and, you know, kind of automatically aligned. And then in lieu of, you know, what you do get are these relationship strength scores, which is things like, is there a lot of activity and is it reciprocal? So I can't just be spamming someone and have a high relationship strength score. That wouldn't be a good indicator. Are they also getting back to me? Has it been recent meetings count for more than just then back and forth emails would. So for any given list, it becomes really easy to kind of separate the wheat from the chaff. That makes sense. Awesome. I think I'm, starting to get a picture. So as we're leaning towards the end, what should people also know about you guys? What other features are either special or what are you specifically proud of being the founder? Great. Well, I'm going to show two things quickly. I'm going to show you an example of our LinkedIn sidebar. So you can see here, this is it comes to life when you visit somebody on LinkedIn. And it's actually the full service app. So you can also browse in there. This one's unobfuscated, but I'll come back here and also point out that there is as well a sidebar for Salesforce. So we're really focused on, and actually we've enhanced this for other clients also. We've kind of taken what Salesforce uh like sometimes so deal cloud is another crm and we can be a sidebar to deal cloud we can basically be a sidebar to whatever you like and or have a sync that pumps data into the crm proper to the crm are you doing the integration work or your clients who's doing the like it's the the client needs to help uh needs to basically use our uh i'm not going to go to a visual for it but there's a um there's a way of mapping the fields just to say, you know, there's kind of a, well, I will tell you where it is from our house. Data management or something. Exactly. So from our help, it's like API and integrations, and there's ways to set up various kinds of sync. So there's sync to SQL Server, sync to Snowflake, export to Salesforce. And then this is the kind of, they basically would be answering these prompts. So it really is turnkey. This is a little nerdy looking, but again, it's an admin feature to do that. Some of our clients also really enjoy that the API is built right in. So you can, you can hit the API directly from the console. Sorry, excuse me, from the app. And so these are REST services. So we do view the chief information officer or the head of CRM as a client every bit as much as the people who are looking for deals. The last thing I wanted to show very quickly is If you have a list of firms that you wanted to, I'll actually, I'll put Harder Seacrest, which is my law firm and maybe my accounting firm. Okay. So, but you could paste in, you know, a thousand or so interesting companies or interesting people, and it'll generate a report. Even if it's hundreds, it's kind of a couple seconds. It'll generate a report showing the top several ways in the door. And so this, for example, is, and actually if there was a long, long list, it sorts them by score. So the strong relationships rise to the top and it shows the top several ways. Like you would ask Vince about knowing Tim Manasco. He's a partner there. And we're quite sure that Tim still works there. So, because again, all the data is timestamped. And obviously if this were more exciting example than just my law firm and my accounting firm, you'd see my colleagues having, you know, some of the better ways to get in the door. And who would you give this report to? Because you have all of this in the tool already, right? Well, that particular, the big use case for running that is to be able to say, again, like I'll use this quintessential example of a growth equity firm gets a call from a head of sales and they say, these are 500 companies that represent our target market. Where can you help us? And to be able to not just look them up one by one, but actually have that run analytically. And that's an area where we really shine is set-based analytics with fuzzy matching across different sources and identifiers. So firms are really trying to take CRM, the manual world, of what we're tracking mostly market data, the world outside, the interesting companies that are out there and, you know, and then this automated intelligence and bringing it together in ways that aren't just point, you know, type one, look it up, type one, other, look it up, um, enter. I spoke to Jim, right? It's just this automated understanding so that you could ideally say, these are the companies we're going to be visiting at this conference. Which one should we go meet with? And, you know, who, who do we already know there? Those types of, um, analytics and intelligence. Then again, you can either drop that in to, you can see that in your CRM via sidebar or pipe it in with the sync utility and the API. Superb, Vince. That was awesome. Getting a really good overview. So I hope I do you justice by saying I have not seen somebody else who is running this on premise with this specialization. I did see relationship score features in CRMs already baked in and various degrees of specificity there. But I really like that you guys specialize in this and bring definitely the on-premise angle. And I mean, not everybody wants to swap out CRM just to have a different relationship score, right? But you would be a perfect add-on actually to what people have already. Yeah, thanks. We think so. I also would just leave a little parting thought for folks who are thinking about their CRM strategy and so forth, which is, Aligning entities is really hard and it's foundational. And so our patent, our main patent is in that area and it's on automatic alignment with a manual overlay. So we have a client now that they bought data from Bordex millions of records, and then they went on a very long process of lining that up against their contact cards. By the time they were done with that process, the data was basically stale. And, you know, we have a, we actually have an API connector to BoardX via our partner, RelPro. And you could get the same experience, but, you know, automated. And then when you realize, oh, wait a second, I know two people named, you know, John, Jacobson or whatever, they're not the same person, you can do that on an exception basis. So I think if folks are thinking about their CRM strategy, think about it as understanding the entities and their relationships. And if you're relying on people to do that manually with clumsy tools and manual deduplicating, you're not going to get out of the gate. Yeah, makes perfect sense. And definitely a good parting thought. Thank you so much for speaking to us today. It was a pleasure. And I'm looking forward to meeting you in New York sometime. And I wish you all the best. I'll buy you dinner. Thanks. All right. Thank you."