Transition is a venture capital firm dedicated to investing in climate technology startups. As Transition’s Operating Partner, Tom oversees the firm’s deal-sourcing strategy and operations.
“We are Affinity-centric in our operating model and put a lot of effort into data capture and structure to build out our sourcing, pipeline analysis, and market mapping,” Tom explains.
Separating the signal from the noise
As a VC firm dedicated to investing exclusively in climate tech, Transition found that generalist market intelligence platforms didn’t suit their deal-sourcing needs.
“We were often frustrated with generalist platforms, where we ended up tracking broader sectors that have climate overlap but result in a lot of false positives,” says Tom.
As a result, they would need to manually filter through a flood of irrelevant data to identify suitable opportunities. This made Tom search for a climate-specific platform that could easily integrate with their current systems. Tom conducted a 30-day exercise comparing Seed and Series A deals on different platforms to ensure they chose the best solution.
A steady pipeline of deal-flow straight into Affinity
After carefully evaluating their options, Transition selected Net Zero Insights.
To Tom’s delight, the integration process with Affinity was straightforward. “We simply put in the API key and referenced the Affinity list. All the fields you see on the platform flow through onto Affinity list categories,” Tom explains.
This seamless integration stood in contrast to other platforms that, despite claiming Affinity compatibility, proved buggy or limited. “In several cases, we ended up going via Zapier because their claimed integrations were too problematic,” he adds.
Highly relevant deals
Implementing Net Zero Insights brought significant benefits to Transition:
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Holistic view
Every deal sourced was directly relevant to their investment focus. Because of the climate focus, the sub-sectors are directly relevant to how Transition views the landscape, which has been incredibly useful for analyzing their pipeline and market mapping.
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Structured data
The platform provided well-structured data with a wealth of historical information the team has used to map out grants, climate investor deals, graduation rates, geography, sector, and stages.
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Efficient workflow
The seamless Affinity integration allowed the team to systematically bring data into Affinity, improving their overall view of the climate ecosystem without additional manual effort.
Responsive support
Tom appreciates the hands-on support from Net Zero Insight’s team, who’ve been receptive to suggestions on improving the platform to suit their needs.
With Net Zero Insights, Transition successfully streamlined their climate tech deal sourcing, allowing them to focus on what they do best: investing in promising climate technology startups.
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