Table of Contents
VC internal meetings; Centralize portfolio data
30+ companies
Portugal
Hi Ana, can you share with us Mustard Seed Maze VC’s background?
We are the first impact fund in Portugal (and still the only one), but our founding partners have a collective experience of +30 years combined in impact investing.
We truly believe that impact investing is the biggest economic opportunity of our time. We are looking for daring founders with the vision and courage to build businesses that solve the world’s most pressing social and environmental challenges.
How many portfolio companies have you invested in and is there any investment success you want to share?
We’ve proudly invested in 34 impact-driven businesses. Some of our companies are doing very well.
We consistently measure success through impact metrics; some of the accomplishments are 700 personnel who got decent jobs, 3 tons of plastic saved in organic period products, or 40K tons of CO2 emissions saved through our portfolio companies… to name a few.
What are the challenges you’ve been dealing with before getting to use Rundit?
We collected portfolio data mainly by email and store everything in Excel… There was zero automation in chasing company updates or investor reports. Collecting information from various sources and gathering it in one place took us the most time and energy. But luckily, we quickly automated that part with less enduring pains since we started using Rundit quite early in our investment journey, after our third investment.
Happy to see Rundit listed in the Tech-stack of MSM platform, how does Rundit play a role in your process of managing impact performance of startups?
It plays a key role in our process, it’s a source of truth that our team and founders can rely on.
At MSM, we have an onboarding session for founders, in which we talk about impact cases, business milestones, and how MSM can support founders.
In that context, we talk about the MSM platform and introduce Rundit to founders as an excellent tool to fulfill the reporting requirements for all investors, not only us.
“Founders can use Rundit to draft and send reports to all their investors, not only us.”
Ana Pinheiro, Operations Manager @Mustard Seed Maze
From a portfolio perspective, how do you measure the portfolio impact goal?
Companies report to us via Rundit both financial and impact metrics. The former is quite standard, like revenues, headcount, runway, net income, EBIT,… The latter is tailored to each business, such as how many tons of CO2 were saved, the number of people whose health improved, the number of people who got a decent job, the number of ha under regenerative agriculture…
After collecting metrics, we compare those against the targets we established on the MSM Platform onboarding session led by our colleague – Tina.
For what purpose do you use the investments and portfolio performance dashboards?
We use the dashboards for internal discussion sessions. Dashboards and export functions in Rundit enable me to share results and portfolio metrics with our LPs and auditors.
What are the most prominent results after working with Rundit?
“Rundit ensures that we have all reporting data from founders in a single place, enabling us to save tremendous time.”
At first, I underestimated the need to automate the reporting process. When we reached the third investment, I realized that if we were going to have a portfolio of 35 to 40 companies, it would be too manual, time-consuming and impractical to do the portfolio reporting manually.
Does Rundit enhance collaboration within your VC team?
Yes – We have a quarterly growth session with our venture partners and rely significantly on impact and financial KPIs in Rundit. We often use Rundit as a supporting tool for those sessions, I can quickly jump from one view to another as the discussion develops.
Which functionality(s) do you find the most helpful?
The portfolio performance page allows me to look at the most recent data and filter out the KPIs I need. This is where our team can easily access and check KPIs across the whole portfolio.
“Rundit makes my life so much easier. It’s a source of truth for our portfolio KPIs.”
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