Founders Circle Capital

Data Product

Benchmarking over 5,000 companies across the public & private sectors

Objective

Build an easy-to-use data product for investors and CFOs.

Obstacle

Consolidating and modelling 400+ financial metrics from fragmented sources.

Outcome

A scalable platform benchmarking over 5,000 companies across sectors and growth stages.

Background

Founders Circle Capital (FCC) is a venture capital firm supporting high-growth companies with strategic investments and insights. Over 12 years, FCC built a rich quarterly dataset of financials from both public and private firms, enriched by detailed company metadata from investment analysts.

FCC’s vision was to unify these datasets into a powerful benchmarking product. By combining private and public data, they could offer investors and their network of 500+ CFOs the ability to assess company performance across industry, sector, and stage, and make more informed financial and strategic decisions.

Challenges

Data Silos: Quarterly financial data was stored in Google Sheets, company metadata resided across Salesforce and Airtable, and public datasets were sourced from the Public Comms API. This fragmented data storage hindered the ability to generate valuable, self-serve insights and restricts deeper data exploration.

Data Quality: Company metadata was manually input by investment analysts without consistent data definitions, leading to frequent mislabeling and inconsistencies, particularly in categorical fields.

Fragmented Solution: Although some data sources were centralised, the process was not automated to capture the latest updates. Additionally, the codebase for merging this data was error-prone, lacked structure, and did not follow best practices, making maintenance and scaling challenging.

Solution

Cost-Effective Data Stack: We designed and deployed a composable pipeline using scalable, low-cost tools, refreshing daily and delivering self-serve access to FCC teams and their CFO network, all with an ongoing cost under $100/month.

Automated Google Sheets: With Google Apps Script, financial data now flows automatically from Sheets into BigQuery. From there, curated insights and metadata are piped back into Google Sheets with a single click, giving analysts and CFOs real-time access without technical bottlenecks.

Impact

One Source Of Truth: Managing data across multiple platforms can be time-consuming and prone to inconsistencies. To streamline this process, data from Airtable, Salesforce, and public communications sources is automatically extracted and integrated into a centralised data warehouse daily. This automation ensures data consistency, eliminates manual errors, and provides real-time insights that stakeholders can rely on.

Benchmarking: Over 400 financial and growth metrics were coded, tested, and automated; covering revenue trends, profitability, efficiency, and scalability. Quartile and decile benchmarks were built, allowing direct comparisons across industry, sector, and revenue class. This structured approach enabled CFOs and investors to evaluate relative performance and adopt best practices from top perform.

Data Product: A cost-effective, investor-ready data product that makes it easy to compare performance, spot opportunities, and drive smarter financial strategies.