Elaine Zelby, partner at SignalFire, details how the venture firm uses proprietary software and data aggregation to source deals and support portfolio companies.
“So we buy, scrape, or, you know, aggregate every data signal you could possibly imagine. And our engineers have proprietary algorithms that use that data to do one of two things. One, we have different systems that are alerting systems for us on the investment side. So they pull in all these signals and they try to show us at seed at series A and at series B, who are the cool companies? What should we be looking at? And also trends around markets and things like that fundraising trends. And then we have a bunch of products for the portfolio. Around talent migration, talent movement, who's good, who's in market from a hiring perspective, competitive intel, co-spend analysis, market intel, all that kind of stuff.”
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Disclosure
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