Clarity
Entire team has clarity and transparency into the fund strategy, performance, and what comes next.
Data-Driven Decisions
Efficiently model different outcomes to drive data-driven decision making.
Efficient Reporting
Ability to create thorough LP reports with a few clicks.
Motivate Ventures
Motivate Ventures is a pre-seed and seed investor focused on Fintech and Enterprise software builders. Headquartered in Chicago, MVC Fund I launched in 2019 to support incredible entrepreneurs with foundational capital at the earliest stages of their companies’ life cycle.
Currently investing out of Fund II, Motivate builds deep relationships with its founders, actively supporting them with capital, connections, and operational guidance on their journey from idea to exit.
Currently investing out of Fund II, Motivate builds deep relationships with its founders, actively supporting them with capital, connections, and operational guidance on their journey from idea to exit.
The Challenge
“Running a $40 million fund on Excel just did not seem sustainable. As we were gearing up to raise our second fund, we wanted to improve our modeling capability, how we forecast upcoming rounds, how we scenario plan, and how we forecast capital calls.”
Lauren DeLuca
Co-Founder and General Partner
Motivate Ventures, like most other funds, initially built our fund model in Excel but faced numerous challenges when it came to updating and maintaining the model.
Challenges with data integrity, version control, and modeling different outcomes were issues with the Excel-based process. We also were not tracking every detail, so we intuitively had our arms around where we stood from a deployment schedule but lacked real clarity on upcoming rounds and reserves. Realizing the need for a better and more scalable solution, Lauren DeLuca, Motivate’s Co-Founder and General Partner, sought out an alternative and found Tactyc.
Challenges with data integrity, version control, and modeling different outcomes were issues with the Excel-based process. We also were not tracking every detail, so we intuitively had our arms around where we stood from a deployment schedule but lacked real clarity on upcoming rounds and reserves. Realizing the need for a better and more scalable solution, Lauren DeLuca, Motivate’s Co-Founder and General Partner, sought out an alternative and found Tactyc.
The Solution
“Tactyc was light years ahead of our prior Excel-based solution, or anything we had seen in the market.”
Why did you select Tactyc?
Motivate was connected to Tactyc by a referral and as soon as we saw it it immediately resonated…Tactyc was clearly built specifically for venture capital managers.
Tactyc takes you through a quick but very flexible construction wizard to build your initial construction model. Then as you deploy capital, you add in each investment along with a set of performance cases and you now have a real-time fund forecast and view of expected performance. You can quickly slice the data for added insights and run scenario analyses in minutes to stress-test your model and evaluate potential strategy shifts.
One of the key selling points for us was also the market data aspect – we always depended on market data by stage and industry, but Tactyc gives us the flexibility to access current market data quickly. For e.g., 2023 is clearly a much different market than 2021, and with Tactyc I can easily modify my model based on 2023 data and see how the expected performance changes on-the-fly.
Tactyc takes you through a quick but very flexible construction wizard to build your initial construction model. Then as you deploy capital, you add in each investment along with a set of performance cases and you now have a real-time fund forecast and view of expected performance. You can quickly slice the data for added insights and run scenario analyses in minutes to stress-test your model and evaluate potential strategy shifts.
One of the key selling points for us was also the market data aspect – we always depended on market data by stage and industry, but Tactyc gives us the flexibility to access current market data quickly. For e.g., 2023 is clearly a much different market than 2021, and with Tactyc I can easily modify my model based on 2023 data and see how the expected performance changes on-the-fly.
What was it like to implement Tactyc?
The customization aspect has been great and it’s really easy to use. I did not want to take months and months trying to figure out a software. I wanted it to be completely intuitive and that’s Tactyc to a T.
The other thing is that from a customer support perspective, the entire team has been phenomenal. They are very connected to the user base and responsive with ongoing feature updates.
The other thing is that from a customer support perspective, the entire team has been phenomenal. They are very connected to the user base and responsive with ongoing feature updates.
What was an unexpected benefit of Tactyc?
Where Tactyc really shined for the Motivate team was the ability to operate from a place of transparency with planned and actual investments. The whole team could see the strategy and pacing analysis, all with a forward-looking view of what investments need consideration for follow-ons and when they are likely to need them.
The Results
“Alongside our CRM, Tactyc is by far the most used software in our fund…we use it every day.”
Greater Clarity and Data-Driven Decision-Making
We now have a crispness and confidence in exactly how much capital we need to deploy over what time period,what funding activities are coming in the near term, when we need to call capital, etc.
We have more data-driven decision making and that is very powerful.
We have also incorporated the market data into our workflow. If I’m evaluating a later-stage follow-on opportunity in one of our companies, I like that I can look at its competitors’ raises as part of the evaluation.
We have more data-driven decision making and that is very powerful.
We have also incorporated the market data into our workflow. If I’m evaluating a later-stage follow-on opportunity in one of our companies, I like that I can look at its competitors’ raises as part of the evaluation.
Flexibility
It is really hard to model different outcomes in spreadsheets and scenario modeling is a huge part of what we do. Tactyc enables scenario planning so easily.
Improved Efficiency
Tactyc enables us to work more efficiently. As mentioned, we spend less time modeling and get greater insights. Our team knows what to work on. And with LP reporting, Tactyc enables thorough reporting, guarantees accuracy, and automates some of the manual work we had to do previously.
Increased Transparency
Transparency has been very powerful. The full team understands our fund strategy and has absorbed it, in part because they can see it and how its expressed in Tactyc. They can see what we’ve done and why, what the portfolio looks like today, exactly how much money we have left and the cadence of how we should invest those funds. They can see how the fund is performing. It is important to us that the team is not just operating in the dark and they in turn really enjoy that transparency. Tactyc also helps the team know what to work on in some ways – they can see what rounds are coming and which companies likely need to raise. It has also been very helpful for reporting internally and helps hold us accountable.
