Table of Contents
Simplify portfolio reporting in multiple currencies; Internal and external reporting
120+ companies
Mauritius
Hi Vuyo, can you share Launch Africa VC’s background and the industries you’ve been investing in?
We are a pan-African VC fund solving the significant funding gap in the Seed and pre-Series A investment landscape in Africa. We invest in tech-enabled start-ups in the African continent which are solving the challenges of everyday Africans and entrepreneurs across multiple sectors (currently we’ve been investing in 10 sectors).
Do you mainly invest in early-stage or growth-stage companies? What is your usual ticket size?
We invest in both early-stage and growth-stage companies to the extent that the latter is pre-Series A. Our average ticket size is US$200k and potentially up to US$300k per transaction.
How many portfolio companies have you invested in?
Up to the time of this interview, we have backed over 120 portfolio companies. One of our key milestones is that we have been investing in some frontier markets, such as Senegal, DRC, and Zimbabwe, where just a few institutional investors have ventured.
What are the challenges you’ve been dealing with before getting to use Rundit?
It’s data management. Chasing company updates and investor reports has never been automated before. A lot of the updates were still captured and reviewed manually. Meanwhile, our portfolio is growing rapidly, so we need a certain level of automation in our process.
How did you collect and store portfolio and investment data before Rundit? Did your companies report KPIs to you in different currencies?
We used excel. And yes, reports in multiple currencies make it challenging to compare performance. Moreover, when it comes to calculating investment returns, fair values and other fund KPIs, the exercise in excel becomes more laborious.
Which part of the process took the most time, resources and energy from you and your team?
I would say it’s the task of collecting data and ensuring that we’ve captured it accurately on our side, same for collecting and collating data for our external fund audit.
Since you are managing portfolio companies in Rundit instead of inviting them to the platform, do you have any process to collect company data and integrate it into Rundit?
We requested metrics from portfolio companies via email and calls, then created linked google sheet documents with some key KPIs for each company. As the last step, we sync them with Rundit.
Having invested in companies in 20+ countries, do you convert portfolio data into one single currency for analyzing and comparing company growth?
Absolutely yes!
For what purpose do you use the investments overview and portfolio performance dashboards?
The idea is to have an internal view of the portfolio as a whole but also to easily extract views for our LP investors.
How do you use the data export function in Rundit?
We use them as appendices to our LP Investor Reports.
What are the biggest results after working with Rundit?
“Rundit has enabled a centralized space for our portfolio company information (incl. documents), thus lets everyone focus less on data collection and more on insight and value creation.”
— Vuyo Mzini, Head of Portfolio @Launch Africa VC
Does Rundit enhance collaboration and productivity within your VC team?
Rundit lets everyone focus less on data collection and more on insight and value creation.
Which functionality do you find the most helpful?
The syncing google sheets!
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