Defining your TIU (total investable universe) in a systematic way is key to ensuring you don’t miss out on lucrative deals.

But where do you start? With thousands of potential investment opportunities, it can seem almost impossible to narrow down and consistently monitor the companies that are a fit for your portfolio.

While scouring conferences and using tools like PitchBook, and Crunchbase helps, it’s not quite enough. Most VCs are already using these same tools and they only cover a subset of companies + signals available. And there are other challenges with the data plus purchasing lists from firmographic providers.

Critical factors to consider

Some of the basic factors needed to come up with a decent list:

• Geography: company and team location, as it aligns with your investment criteria + proximity to competition
• Company size: typically measured by the number of employees and revenue (if available)
• Industry classifications: to ensure you’re targeting the right sector like health tech, enterprise software, etc
• Funding info: total company funding plus timing of the last funding round 
• Founded date: to understand what stage they’re in
• Team composition: who are the founders and what does the rest of the team look like?
• Growth rates: for each company over time as measured by employee growth or overall traction

Some common challenges

First off, that’s already a lot to consider and to get right.  And while the number of employees, geo, founded date, and funding info are typically sufficiently covered, other metrics are less straightforward.

For example, when it comes to industry/sector classification, the standard industry codes (SIC/NAICS) are not super helpful. Simply put, they don’t align with the more modern way VCs/PEs view companies or classify themselves. For example, companies in enterprise software, fintech, crypto might be classified as Business Services, Non-classifiable establishments, Financial services, etc.

Another general challenge for data providers is coverage of bootstrapped companies in addition to companies that are funded. And getting up-to-date information on these companies at scale.

Oftentimes, the answer is to use multiple vendors to paint a complete picture of your total addressable market and connect the data via an internal platform/CRM.

Building company lists with Fintent

In short, it’s crucial to use accurate and scalable data when building out your TIU. Cobbling together different data sources is not easy and monitoring them over time is not easy. That’s why at Fintent we’ve created the Company Search product to ensure this critical task gets addressed. To get the right signals, we’ve partnered up with multiple data providers, scraped millions of websites and utilize advanced machine learning techniques + NLP.

If you’d like to learn more and get a custom list created for you, reach out to schedule a live demo with us today