Venture Scanner

Insights make all the difference

“Venture Scanner’s insights help us make sense of emerging sectors and zero in on opportunities.” Duncan Davidson, Managing Director at Bullpen CapitalAt Venture Scanner, we pride ourselves on our analyst insights. While we think of ourselves as a technology company and are reinventing the analyst coverage industry from the ground up with data, technology, and workflows, we ultimately see our analyst insights as the determining factor when our customers make decisions. Whether it is a CIO or CMO making a key purchasing or partnership decision, or a VC making an investment decision, or a corporate development executive making an acquisition decision, in all these cases the determining factor has been the insights on top of the data and companies our technology has aggregated, clustered, and organized.Our technology enables our analysts to surface companies in sectors and assess how companies are performing based on available social, traction, and financing data, but to truly cut through the noise our analysts immerse themselves in the sectors we cover and gather firsthand intelligence. The amount of publicly available data on private companies is very limited, and the earlier stage the company, the more finite that data set is. Many times the data set available is limited to what the companies themselves have uploaded on properties like AngelList, traffic or app data from services like Compete, and social data from Twitter. There are also crowd signals from products like ProductHunt that we factor in. However, while the sum of all this publicly available data might give us an okay first approximation of what companies might be trending, it certainly does not provide the insight to make a purchasing, investing, or acquisition decision where significant sums of money are at stake.Such decisions require actionable insights. In order to provide insightful and actionable intelligence to our customers, we organize our operations around domain experts who play the role of sector analysts. Our sector analysts spend their days fully immersed in the sectors they cover through the following activities:Product Lens: Creating trial accounts in the companies within their sectors, using the products, and determining unique differentiators, strengths, and weakness for said products.Primary Research: Meeting one-on-one with companies within their sectors to understand strategic direction, key feature releases on the horizon, and operating metrics.Trend Identification: Attending sector focused events/meetups and meeting with VCs investing in their sectors to catch emerging trends.The sum of all this gives our sector analysts the raw ingredients to form actionable insights for our customers. These include defining the unique drivers of each category of companies and highlighting the companies that are exhibiting them, compiling feature and usability comparisons amongst the companies within a category, and stating the key assumptions within a category that will determine future growth.So, while unearthing the data on private companies through our technology provides the starting point for making sense of any given sector, category, or company, the final answer lies in insights. Give our analyst insights a try, contact me at [email protected] or 650-218-0067.Nader

Announcing On-Demand Diligence

While most of you know us for our ongoing coverage of emerging sectors through our subscription scans to the Financial Technology, Internet of Things, Digital Health, and many other sectors, we have quietly started a new service.

How can startups and entrepreneurs gain an unfair advantage with Venture Scanner?

"Developing a deeper understanding of the IoT domain and ecosystem through Venture Scanner gave me a leg up when I started my company." Atif Noori, Founder & CEO, emberlight

UPDATE: Retail online to offline

In the time that I have been tracking the retail online to offline space at Venture Scanner, I am even more convinced that startups in this sector are among the most exciting and innovative. With the most up-to-date one-pager below, it is easy to see the breadth of categories covered as well as the investor interest.

Does R&D Spending Correlate to Innovation?

I came across some very insightful data flipping through Evangelos Simoudis’ slide deck on Corporate Innovation.

Competitive Analysis in Venture Capital Diligence: Introduction

James Conlon is a co-founder of Venture Scanner and Partner at Bullpen Capital

Deal Discovery Is a Process

May the Right Company Win the Deal

A couple years ago after Autodesk purchased short form video creation app Socialcam, my co-founder Jereme Monteau and I asked each other why Socialcam out of all the other video creation apps? Was Socialcam the best fit for Autodesk’s strategic needs? It may very well have been the best fit for Autodesk’s needs, but we wondered if Autodesk acted with a full understanding of the video creation category.

Startup Scanning Should Be a Daily Corporate Habit

I recently came across an incredibly telling chart by Richard Foster, co-author of Creative Destruction and a Director at Innosight. The chart shows the average length of time corporations last in the S&P 500. In 1958, the average corporation lasted 61 years. In 1980, the average was 25 years. Today it is about 18 years. See full Innosight report.What leads to corporations losing their leadership position and how can they prevent it? Foster notes that the root-cause lies in the inability to reinvent the corporation. The pace of innovation and startup activity continues to only accelerate, meaning reinvention must happen in an ongoing fashion as part of the corporate DNA. Corporations must keep a pulse on emerging innovations, understand trends and insights, and take actions that will keep them relevant. This is our key mission at Venture Scanner, to enable corporations do just that. Nader

What is a Venture Scanner scan?

Last week I wrote about why we started Venture Scanner and why it’s important. Today I want to share what a scan is.The simplest description of a scan is a one stop shop for data and insights on any emerging technology sector. It includes a dynamic map of all the companies in the sector, curated daily news, and original analyst insights. We aim to make it easy to continuously keep a pulse on sectors of interest, monitor companies, or find opportunities.Our approach is one part technology and one part analyst context. Our technology aggregates available data on companies and organizes companies into clusters. Our analysts then arrange these clusters into dynamic maps that represent a technology sector like 3D Printing, Retail Online to Offline, Financial Technology, etc. Our technology then continuously refreshes the scans while our analysts build an ongoing insights layer on top of the data.The insights layer is derived by fully immersing ourselves in the sectors we cover. Our analysts are in regular contact with the companies in a sector, derive what the drivers for success are, and spot trends as they emerge. These insights combined with the underlying data enable our customers to make informed decisions and take action.Through Venture Scanner you can answer the following questions:Who are the companies in a technology sector?How do the companies stack up against one another?What are the key drivers for success in a sector and which companies are exhibiting them?Our scans are dynamic and updated daily, so you’ll rest assured knowing you are not missing material events.Nader