At Caplight, our mission is to unlock capital for the VC asset class by turning fragmented data into actionable insights. We started with a simple idea: If we aggregate all secondary market transaction data in one place, can we drive better price discovery and liquidity?

The early answer was a clear “Yes,” especially from secondary funds and brokers, who were our first adopters.

But as our data footprint grew, we started adding new customers: $1T+ asset managers, investment banks, data aggregators, and traditional VCs.

Now, VC is one of our fastest-growing customer segments, giving me rare access to this group’s challenges. After 100+ conversations with VCs this year, one thing is clear: sourcing is still broken.

Too much time chasing noise. Not enough time spent with the right founders.

I thought, “how is this still a problem?” So I dug in.

Here’s what I found.

Where do sourcing hours go?

Great VCs find great founders and build trust with them early. Great deals follow.

Partners focus on the best-of-the-best founders and winning the right to invest. But who keeps the firm’s top of funnel full? Sourcing responsibility mostly falls to junior and mid-level investors, jockeying to find the next big thing.

Every firm approaches this differently, but the process usually follows 5 steps:

The common frustration can be summarized as: “I spend more time finding and disqualifying companies than meeting with good founders.”

Mapping and qualifying companies is like solving a puzzle.

Matching the right private companies to an investment thesis is challenging, even with the help of LLMs. New startups launch every day, incumbents pivot, buzzwords are adopted, and market noise makes it hard to know where to focus.

To really qualify an opportunity, you have to meet the founders. But before reaching out to a company, you need to be able to answer questions like:

• What does this company actually do?

• Who are their customers, competitors, and what traction have they shown?

• Who are the founders, and how strong is the team?

• Which investors backed them?

• When is the next investment opportunity?

The problem: this information is scattered across multiple sources and compiling it takes too long.

Other VCs won’t wait for you to do your homework.

A study from the National Bureau of Economic Research and Wharton, found that venture deals close up to 7X faster in hot markets, with some rounds closing in as little as 48 hours.

Spending hours mapping and qualifying companies keeps you flat-footed in competitive markets. You risk losing deals to investors who are spending time building real relationships with founders.

Every minute spent disqualifying companies is a minute you could spend building relationships with the next game-changing company, winning the right to invest in them.

Caplight 2.0 gives you more time to meet quality founders.

We combined our private market data expertise with the latest AI tools to make theme mapping and company qualification effortless, shifting junior VC sourcing hours from low to high value.

All the data you need in one place…

We give investors a curated database of 20,000 private companies (and growing), plus the information you need to qualify or disqualify opportunities:

• Company data: Dynamically updated business descriptions, business models, sector/vertical classifications, and target customers. No need to re-tag or re-match companies to themes.

• Investor data: Over 10,000 venture firms and 100,000 VC investor contacts, showing which funds are backing which themes and companies. Powerful qualification signal.

• Funding round data: [60,000] venture funding rounds, with full fundraising histories for each company. Funding amount raised and timing can turn a lead into an opportunity.

• Market signal: $300B+ of our proprietary secondary market transactional data and sentiment layered in from news and social media.

• Founder data: Coming soon! We know how important this is.

The days of manually compiling lists, tagging companies to themes, and stitching together investor and signal data from multiple sources are over.

… And tools to cut through the noise.

• Natural language search: Enter your investment thesis or themes of interest and instantly generate the list of relevant companies.

• Qualifying filters: Refine by thesis, business model, geography, fundraising history, and the quality of existing investors.

• Company tracking: Save and share lists, and enable notifications to keep tabs on the companies that matter the most.

Get your time-to-coffee down now.

From talking with 100 VCs, one thing is clear: no matter how sharp your thesis, how precise your list, or how creative your intro, if you meet founders too late, you lose. When sourcing is your job, cutting “time-to-coffee” is what puts you on track for Partner.

Book your Caplight 2.0 beta demo and become an early adopter.

– Javier