When investment firms weigh the value of potential investments, one of the initial challenges is understanding the strength of the target company as well as its competitive landscape. Due diligence is critical for venture capital firms, hedge funds, and private equity companies — and finding great data to support decision-making is essential.
Platforms like Slintel, a 6sense company, provide a huge advantage to investors by offering firmographic and technographic insights that can transform their investment decision-making.
Read on to learn more about these types of data, including how they offer insight that helps firms like yours invest with confidence, and a platform that puts accurate, up-to-date data all in one place.
Investment Decision-Making Needs Better Data
Investment decision-making often looks like this:
- Identify a potential investment
- Conduct a fundamental analysis
- Conduct a technical analysis
The results of the analyses are a major determining factor in the final investment decision, and firms’ decisions are only as good as their data quality. The key to better decision-making is better data, like data that tells firms about company behavior, market share, key competitors, and other factors.
Using a platform like Slintel, firms can get insight into potential companies to invest in and make predictions based on technology adoption patterns, indicators of company health, and other digital footprints.
Here’s how.
The Bigger Picture: Firmographic and Technographic Insights
Slintel tracks more than 29,000 technologies across 16+ million companies, generating more than 60 data points of actionable data.
For investment firms, these insights shed light on how a company is truly performing and how it’s expected to perform in the future.
Slintel connects with a variety of sources to update over 60 attributes weekly for 15 million companies. We then use this data to generate market reports highlighting:
- Funding
- Acquisition
- Growth
- Leadership changes
- Executive movements
- Product launches
- Expansions
- Events
- Technographic changes
- Psychographic changes
For example, did the company recently post 200 jobs? They’re probably experiencing rapid growth and are a good investment opportunity. If they stopped hiring or there is news of layoffs, probably not.
Did the company make an investment in technology? Adoption of new tools can signify a company is setting up infrastructure to support major growth or exploring new avenues of revenue-generation.
Past, Present, Future: Historical Data, Up-to-Date Data, and Predictive Models
This information from Slintel goes back years, giving venture capital firms a complete picture of how a potential portfolio company has been performing over time, how it’s trending compared to competitors, customer growth and decline, and other important factors for a future investment decision.
What’s more, Slintel pulls in firmographic data from various sources, and always presents the most up-to-date data so you can always have confidence in your decisions.
The technographic data also follows a rigorous validation process:
- The research team analyzes technographic patterns every 15 days to identify stale signatures
- The data engineering team works on data extraction/analysis and benchmarking
- The QA team performs dipstick tests on the data before it’s published
- A confidence score is assigned based on the source, type of source, and last detected date — and users can determine the confidence score they are most comfortable with for data extracts
New data gets fed into a predictive model so firms can see not only how companies have been performing, but also how they’re positioned to perform in the future. This helps firms keep an eye on present portfolios as well as potential investments, informing their strategy, and helping them find ways to get struggling investments back on track.
Wall Street is Already Using This Data for a Competitive Edge
Curious to see what this kind of data can do to help your investment decision-making?
A New York-based global investment manager uses Slintel’s technographics to build large scale data modeling algorithms that get closer to predicting the price movements of the stock market. They import thousands of technologies that are refreshed monthly and plugged directly into their algorithms.
The rich technographic data that they plug in helps them operate at scale, executing millions of trades per day. According to a data scientist at this firm, “With Slintel technographics, we’ll be able to spot patterns and understand the shifting landscape of tech adoption.”
The Takeaway
Venture capital firms, hedge funds, and private equity companies make the most informed investment decisions when they have access to all of the data available. Firmographic and technographic data from a platform like Slintel is an integral part of the puzzle, as well as intent data from platforms like 6sense.
Relying on data eliminates guesswork, and helps firms proceed with confidence knowing they are making solid, data-backed decisions regarding where to invest.
