Crowdfunding: 5 financing tools to manage your investment cycle

French startups raised over €2 billion in 2016. This is the sign of a paradigm shift in project financing, now more than ever in the hands of venture capitalists. Whether they're business angels or venture capital funds, investors must therefore structure themselves like banks to manage the investment cycle efficiently. Here's how.

What are the needs of investor groups?

When more than 20 investors gather around a single active fund, a number of issues emerge, the main ones being:

• How to manage investor relations, i.e. the relationship between a fund's management and its investors?
• How to manage the investment portfolio and optimize its performance?
• How to manage investment opportunities and deal flow?
• How do you determine the value of a project?

These questions arise as the fund becomes more professional. It is essential to put in place best practices to streamline the investment cycle, otherwise the fund's performance will suffer from an inertia too strong for innovative projects.
These best practices come with the right tools: agile, structuring and secure. Here are 5 of our investment management software comparisons that are particularly well-suited to the uses in question:

1) DilRoom: sharing confidential files

The exchange of confidential information is not an option between entrepreneurs and investors. Indeed, an entrepreneur needs to provide maximum transparency about his project to convince an investor. However, this is a major obstacle for project owners, who fear information leaks to competitors or other potential shareholders. The solution to this problem is called DilRoom.

DilRoom is an end-to-end secure online file-sharing software. Notable features include

• remote control of document rights,
• read-only document preview (cannot be downloaded),
• emergency closing of Dataroom accesses,
• the Q&A module, enabling investors to ask private or public questions.

DilRoom hosts your data in 4 ISO 27001-certified data centers in France, ensuring the highest standards of security and confidentiality.

2) Capital Venture: the complete solution for private equity professionals

Capital Venture is a solution published by the French company Klee Group. Klee Capital Venture covers 3 aspects of the private equity business:

• The Front Office manages prospecting and activity monitoring (dashboards and reports), like a vertical CRM for investment.
• The Back Office offers functionalities for administering your investment activity: management of holdings and funds.
• The Communication section is a private space for managing the relationship between investors and the fund. In particular, it enables you to get to know your investors better, and to offer them a space for tracking their project financing.

3) Babbler: manage your press and media relations like a business

An investment fund or investor club can publicize its news to draw attention to its fund or the projects it finances. The benefits are immediate:

• By communicating about the investments made and the successes of the projects for which funds have been raised, the venture capital fund enhances its public image. In fact, the fund's image attracts the highest-quality, high-return projects.
• By communicating on behalf of the projects in which it invests, the fund offers notoriety to the project at a time when it is fragile (unprofitable or in need of acceleration). This generates business opportunities for the company's account and, ultimately, for the investment fund.

Demonstration of the Babbler press relations management tool

Only 3% of press releases are read through traditional channels. At the same time, the number of fund-raising announcements is multiplying, as is the competition between active funds. Babbler is an effective tool to help you stand out from the crowd at low cost.

4) oodrive_sign: electronic signature of legal documents

Fund-raising is punctuated by obligatory stages, often marked by signatures. This is also the case afterwards, at shareholders' general meetings, to name but one example.

The electronic signature has the same legal value as a handwritten signature (law no. 2000-230 of March 13, 2000).

The multiplicity of signatories makes the process so lengthy that some investment projects are aborted. For example, in the case of 10 new shareholders alone, each of them has to sign and initial every page of the 11 copies required to validate the transaction. In addition, each shareholder must physically visit the company's premises to sign all these documents. This situation is typical of the cumbersome nature of the administrative and legal process.

Afflelou Group testifies on the use of oodrive_sign in a restrictive legal context.

The whole administrative and legal process can be shortened to a handful of minutes with oodrive_sign. The tool also has the added benefit of eliminating the costs associated with registered letters. oodrive_sign enables all parties involved in the fundraising process to digitally sign documents such as minutes of general meetings, shareholders' agreements or letters of intent. oodrive_sign is ISO 27001 and Cloud Confidence certified, and uses CertEurope as a trusted third party.

5) Eudonet: XRM and vertical CRM

Eudonet is an XRM (eXtended Relationship Management), which means it can manage extended relationships that are more complex than a simple customer relationship. Thanks to its rich segmentation and contact profiling functions, Eudonet is able to identify the exact profile of each investor, and to weave an intelligent relationship with each of them, despite their sheer number.