Make smarter investment decisions with better data

Combining third-party market data faster helps a venture capital firm inject data throughout the investment process

To make more informed investment decisions, the data product team at a leading venture capital firm was tasked with finding a faster, more efficient way to combine third-party sources and add a unique company identifier. The firm’s initial approach – manually linking data from sources like PitchBook and S&P Capital IQ and using a spreadsheet to track company information – proved too time-consuming.

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Lacking the headcount to manage infrastructure and tired of mapping data sources in a spreadsheet, utilizing a data mastering solution that leveraged machine learning made the most sense. They found the best fit in Tamr’s Market Data Linkage Data Product. 

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Getting trusted data faster has allowed the data product team to provide data for more due diligence projects, enabling the firm to make more data-driven investment decisions.

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Creating accurate data sets at the pace of business 

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Given their focus on investing in technology companies, the venture capital firm purchases third-party data sets to aid with due diligence. The challenge the data product team faced was efficiently linking this data together to keep pace with the firm’s increasing velocity of deals. This newly formed team first handled this task by manually combining the third-party data and tracking data sources in a spreadsheet. After the firm saw value in this market data, the team’s next objectives were to scale the process and make it faster.

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“Getting answers to questions quickly was a challenge. We needed speed. There were a lot of steps to get data from three to five different sources, clean it up, and make it look like a unified data set,” the data product manager said.

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Also important was getting better data without increasing headcount. The team was lean so hiring data scientists or engineers to set up and maintain infrastructure wasn’t an option. The head of data suggested Tamr, having used it at his previous employer, a major investment firm. Tamr combines built-in data quality capabilities with powerful, AI-driven ID linkage and enrichment to deliver the best version of your data. And as a SaaS solution, Tamr doesn’t require extensive infrastructure. 

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Master company data from disparate sources to power insight-driven investment strategies

Map entities across disparate sources of market data efficiently and accurately. Create a common identifier (“TamrID”) that can be used to simplify joins across market data sources and keep your analytics up-to-date.

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Tamr’s Market Data Linkage Data Product enables investment firms to gain complete, accurate, and continuously-updated views of portfolio companies and potential investments with minimal effort. The built-in data quality services and entity resolution models, built using Tamr’s patented artificial intelligence and machine learning models, easily scale as organizations acquire new, third-party data sources. 

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Injecting data into the investment process

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The data product team now has a repeatable, standardized way to carry out due diligence projects and has set up a self-service data system. Anyone in the firm can search for and access data on 400,000 companies and get a better understanding of what’s going on with the business. The velocity at which data is being injected into the firm has increased substantially. The team now completes multiple due diligence projects each week, compared to around 10 per quarter before using Tamr. 

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“The team gets a lot of compliments on how much work we're able to produce and how responsive we are. I think that's an indicator that this initiative is working,” the data product manager said.

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With accurate market data, the firm can more easily identify other third-party data sets that it may want to add for greater insight. And, having a standardized process for integrating market data makes adding new data to an existing dataset much easier, enhancing the firm’s data on a company. 

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“Our ability to meet the demands of the firm has significantly increased. Being better informed increases the likelihood that we’ll make the right decisions. Increasing our due diligence projects by, say, a factor of five, over the course of the first year with Tamr and maybe accelerating beyond that to touch every diligence project in a year is really exciting,” the data product manager said. “One new investment pays back the investment in Tamr multiple times over.”

The firm stores its data in the Snowflake Data Cloud. Being able to directly land clean market data into Snowflake from Tamr using a connector allows the data team to spend less time on moving data and more time on using that data to help the business.