2100 Ventures is a €30m early-stage VC fund, launched in late 2022 to invest in the European 'sustainable industrial revolution', a concept that has been used to describe the transformational impact of technologies on businesses. For Europe, 2100 expects this shift to revolve around three key pillars: Data & FinTech, Climate & DeepTech, and SaaS.

2100 has a pan-European focus and wants to support ‘European’ founders. The fund is led by ‘the three Andreas’, who have had their own experiences leaving Italy very early to take the next steps in their career. As GPs, they now want to support local talent in bringing their vision to life beyond its borders, create a strong community of Italian founders and successful entrepreneurs abroad, and to facilitate access to Southern Europe for founders from other regions.

The Power of Data in Alpha Generation

Andrea Gurnari is at the helm of the team’s data-led initiatives. His career to date spans Bloomberg, Goldman Sachs and several Venture Capital firms including Atomico — to name but a few places where his responsibilities, beyond making investments, have also revolved around the use of data to generate alpha. Today, one of his largest long-term projects as an investor is the development of differentiated data-driven strategies.

When he first started to build the firm’s data infrastructure, he crucially needed to create systems and processes that would enable the generation of meaningful alpha.

“As a fund, you can’t get too fixated on all the possible ways of finding ‘alpha’. Being a successful VC isn’t just about investing in the next Facebook, it’s about staying relevant, and being early. Every data-driven initiative needs to be centred around these principles, so that its impact can be felt not just in the way we source deals, but also how the entire firm operates, and how we can support our founders.

The 2100 strategy revolves around the north-star metric of maximising the 'impact-over-ticket size ratio' for our portfolio. As an Emerging Manager doing collaborative tickets, the challenge of scalability remains in this approach. That is when using data-driven approaches becomes a key alpha generator. Sourcing is a key aspect of our business, but I am constantly thinking about new ways to use data to improve our operational processes around three areas. Be there early, win deals, walk the talk with our founders.”

Andrea shares with us why 2100 Ventures chose to partner with Specter, and how our platform and data have played an important part in establishing and maintaining their competitive advantage.

Buy, Build — And, Not Or

The most robust methodologies for harnessing and using data as an investment firm come from the ability to buy what already works well, and build what doesn’t. With Specter, you don’t need to build systems for data aggregation, association and maintenance from scratch, as we take care of this for you and make the information easily accessible through our frontend interface. 

Equally, we give you access to our full range of data points relevant to currently fast-growing companies, compelling founder profiles, and other funds’ interest in them. Andrea appreciates the flexibility of being able to use the platform to find those all-important signals, and sit with the standalone data to establish additional strategies unique to his team’s approach.

“There’s certainly a long-lasting relationship from a build perspective. You know exactly where we are going in terms of ideas and projects, and we know exactly what you are doing to get us there. We continuously evaluate tools on the market, and time and time again, Specter comes out on top with a data solution and UX that’s markedly better than the competition.”

Additionally, he is confident that commoditisation isn’t something he needs to worry about working with us, as he knows the power of Specter will always come down to how the signals are contextualised.

Use Cases

2100 Ventures is part of the more recent wave of Emerging Managers, and knows all too well the challenges that can come with being a first-time fund. Assessing their performance when TVPI, BPI, and other historical benchmarks aren’t available means that it’s key to have some way of identifying potential beyond the usual indicator of fund returns.

“Visibility is paramount, as our ability to seek and secure allocation will always depend on how much we see and when we see it. There are three core pillars to our thesis, making it super important for us to:

• See everything early in the Italian startup market

• See who is part of the Italian diaspora of founders building businesses elsewhere

• See European companies that want to be more involved in Southern Europe”

To capture the full scope of what’s out there at scale, one of Andrea’s overarching strategies is to use Company Signals to filter for the universe of organisations relevant to them, and crosscheck this against all the Italian and European companies they already know. Our latest improvements to Integrations make this process even easier, as the My CRM section automatically pulls all your companies and those you’ve interacted with into one place. It’s another way to identify knowledge gaps and supplement deal flow with companies within your scope that are doing well right now.  

The feed can also be used to add another dimension to any competitive landscaping efforts. It allows you to map out markets according to the criteria most important to you, which beyond location could span growth stage, financials, (sub-)industries, and more changeable metrics like headcount growth, web traffic data, news mentions — the list goes on. Any companies of interest can be directly added to your pipeline using the Integrations, and of those new and existing startups you can prioritise those that are fastest-growing right now, against any of the 200+ data points on each company profile.

Another way Andrea uses Specter is to enhance their network creation, by leveraging Talent Signals and Strategic Signals to assess quality and blindspots.

“You don’t generally know how big your network is, and there are lots of inherent biases in how you organically build your network and perceive it. If you observe the data in Specter and see there is a high concentration of spinout founders from a given company, for example, you can crosscheck that with your existing networks from that organisation and see where your own connections are lacking.

Equally, if I see other investors showing interest in a founder, I might already know them, but still be intrigued to understand how our assessment of the opportunity differed to peers and competing funds.”

Success Story

2100 Ventures shared with us that they have already found and closed a deal thanks to Specter. Andrea told us the process he adopts in his day-to-day use of Specter, that ultimately led to them securing the investment. 

• Know what you’re looking for and craft your own universe of relevant opportunities
  In Specter, they have a Saved Search for tracking Italian founders in our Talent Signals feed. He uses the Location filter to see those based locally, and the Languages filter on Specter to capture diaspora founders.

• Review the signals on a weekly basis, when they’re recently released and fresh
  One of our signals picked up that this founder was going into ‘Stealth’, 7 months ahead of when they officially announced the company, thus enabling them to act ahead of the wider market.

• Create outbound strategies connected to this review process, and get in touch with founders of interest as soon as possible
  He connected with the founder on LinkedIn and clicked with them straightaway. Finding them on Specter at the exact right time meant they could be there for this founder from the very beginning of their journey as an entrepreneur.

• Build a long-lasting relationship with the founders you find
  Andrea and the team were even able to advise on round composition, because they met at the very beginning of their journey as an early-stage startup. This was a game changer for them as Early Managers. Usually, when a deal is hot they would need to fight hard for their allocation. Here, Specter gave them the velocity advantage. Even in cases where other investors might have known of this opportunity, 2100 Ventures could still come in with a high degree of relevance.

“The Power Law heavily dictates outcomes in our industry, and for us using Specter has already paid off in the sense that even finding one deal on the platform makes our subscription worthwhile. 

But still, the biggest mistake you can make in measuring the success of Specter as a tool is to purely see it as a channel for finding ‘the next big thing’. Those who use the platform in the smartest way find avenues to apply the signals across their workflows, whether this be in applications relevant to network enhancement, bolstering the fund’s visibility into markets, understanding who are the greatest founders in your CRM — or indeed those you are yet to discover.”