Before 1869, the world of chemistry was a realm of sophisticated confusion. Scientists knew about dozens of elements like gold, oxygen, carbon, iron but this knowledge existed in silos. A chemist in London might have a notebook full of observations about lithium, while another in Berlin had unconnected data on beryllium.
It was messy, scattered and essentially an alchemy which is a collection of brilliant but isolated data points which lack a unifying structure.
Then came Dmitri Mendeleev. He made the list organised. Dmitri realized that if you organize elements by their atomic properties, a pattern emerges. The result was the Periodic Table. It completely wiped out dis-organisation.
In the Periodic Table, Mendeleev famously left gaps. He predicted that elements we haven’t even discovered yet must exist to fill those spaces. He even went ahead and predicted their properties.
The lesson here is profound: Organization helps to build insight. You cannot see the bigger picture, let alone predict the future, when your data is locked in disconnected drawers. You can’t see the pattern in disorganized data.
The Modern Alchemy of Venture Capital
At Auxano Capital, we are constantly in-taking loads of information: new deal flows, portfolio performance metrics, founder communications, documentation, market research etc.
A few months ago this data lived everywhere (Gdrive, CRM, email etc). We had a legacy CRM for contact management, email threads for communication, spreadsheets for portfolio tracking, and cloud drives for documents. To get a holistic view of a single portfolio company meant opening five different tabs and piecing together a narrative. In VC, speed is important…
The Migration: Building Our Single Source of Truth
Recently, we decided to stop practicing alchemy and start practicing chemistry. We undertook a major migration to move our entire operational infrastructure into one unified system. It was a significant undertaking to move away from established habits and legacy software platforms, but the goal was clear: create a single pane of glass for everything we do and power it with AI.
The change is transformative for how we operate as a team at Auxano. Communication has shifted from noisy email chains to contextual channels. If we are discussing a specific deal, the conversation happens right next to the data and documents for that deal. The context is never lost.
Additionally, the platform offers AI powered automation and agents to automate all the regular workflows like:
- Automatic identification of industries for new investment opportunities and representation of industries in an automation pie chart.
- AI for drafting and sending mails once an opportunity is passed.
- Auto-assigning of tasks to relevant team members (Investments, compliance etc)
- Channels for information sharing powered with AI for quick summaries, identification of opportunities etc.
- Tracking timelines for opportunities and more!
Managing our entire workflow in one platform means nothing slips through the cracks. Every stage of the investment pipeline, operations etc is visible to all the team members instantly.
Sustainability and Speed Through Structure
It’s like Mendeleev’s table, this structure is helping us build a better version of ourselves. By unifying our systems, we have laid the foundation for the future. We are now positioned to layer AI tools on top of our data to help us spot trends faster, automate routine follow-ups, and perhaps, like Mendeleev, identify the “missing elements” in our thesis.
Author,
Tanmay Gajbhiye
