Edda, a Paris-based collaborative software platform for professional investors, announced on Thursday that it has secured $5.8M in a funding round.
The latest investment comes from investors including Mucker Capital, Plug&Play, FJ Labs, Tony Fadell’s Future Shape – the fund founded by iPhone inventor – and angel investor, Arnaud Bonzom.
As the French company raised its latest capital, we at Tech Funding News reached out to Clément Aglietta, founder and CEO of Edda, to learn more about the company’s origin, fund utilisation, plans, markets, and more.
Fund utilisation
The company will use the funds to continue hiring talent and build the product offering as the business scales.
Throwing light on the tacking recession, Aglietta shares, “We didn’t need to fundraise for four years. We could do this because we built the product in-house and understood its value, so we could go to market with the initial product with very little investment and generate revenue immediately. This is why we are so compelling: we were able to build a global customer base quickly.”
What does Edda do?
According to Aglietta, investment decisions are increasingly driven by multiple data points. As a result, information is required to make good decisions – this is what Edda provides.
Edda’s software provides a platform everyone can use across all functions, bringing significant efficiencies.
The platform provides easy access to publicly available information and data about invested companies via integrations with databases such as Crunchbase and Pitchbook. It also has a feature that automatically enables information to be ‘pulled’ from emails, documents, or Dropbox files.
“Edda’s design is based on our experience of the challenge and opportunity of data and communication – it is a methodology to resolve problems and highlight opportunities,” he adds.
The company also built APIs to track news relating to companies and funds that have existing profiles.
Origin story
Before founding Edda, Clément Aglietta was one of the first employees at FJ Labs in New York.
Aglietta shares, “We quickly grew to 300 investments in only two years but found no tools on the market to keep track of those useful investments. Furthermore, the only existing tools were based on old technology and were not properly integrated with other services, such as Crunchbase and Pitchbook.”
He continues, “My team and I built Edda to solve this challenge based on our real needs, but once we began to grow, we had to spin out of the VC to focus on building the business. So we decided to build the software investors want to use daily.”
Market adoption
Currently, Edda works within the private markets, where investors have more than $6.5T under management which will go up to $9T in 2025.
“The private market is now bigger than the public market. E-Front and Ipreo are generating more than $150M in revenue, which is still the beginning as most funds are still using Excel,” he remarks.
“Bloomberg is generating $10B in revenue per year. We strongly believe that the same level of revenue is possible for the private markets,” he adds.
Currently, Edda work across the entire private investment space, including PE firms, corporate venture, family offices, and investment banks. In addition, over 100 customers use Edda across 26 countries, including Plug&Play, BPI France, Amazon Industry Innovation Fund, and Headline.
The company’s ultimate goal is to become the number one software tool for the private equity market.
Case study: How does Edda solve the problem?
Further, Aglietta also shared an exclusive customer case study with us.
Aglietta says one partner of an investment fund that uses Edda received an email about an investment opportunity.
Consequently, the Edda email plug-in automatically captures the company’s name, checks if the company is already in the pipeline, and synchronises all the public information from Crunchbase and Pitchbook.
The deal is automatically sent to the pipeline for the rest of the investment team to work on it collaboratively by adding comments and reading the documents and the emails already exchanged with this company.
The system generates a unique and secure link for this company profile, and the investment team can share the information with external contacts very securely.
Based on the company profile, the system will generate a slide for each company in the pipeline that can be reviewed weekly.
Once the investor decides to invest, the profile will move into the portfolio management area of the tool, again automatically generating a profile with information such as revenue and cap table. ‘
The company founders can be invited to collaborate and update the information.
He says that Edda’s portfolio management features help investors to generate LP reports that are EVCA compliant automatically. Investors will be able to share this report on the LP’s Portal.
“This helps build relationships between the investor and LPs, improving transparency to support the next fundraising round. This particular customer raised +$1B with this tool,” he concluded.
Fabrice Grinda, Founding Partner at FJ Labs, says, “Much like Bloomberg altered an industry’s ability to operate, Edda will transform how investors visualise their fund and manage their deal-flow and relationships. Venture capital and private equity, in general, have gone from strength to strength over the past decade, spreading into new sectors and becoming the cornerstone of innovation investment. As we face a more challenging investment environment, investors need game-changing collaborative tools such as Edda to help to ensure they remain one step ahead.”
