Rev1 spots investment opportunities sooner while cutting research time in half

Columbus, OH, USA
Started using Feedly: September 2018

Rev1 is an investor startup studio that combines capital and strategic services to help startups scale and corporations innovate. The company focuses on industries including enterprise software, data analytics, fintech, insurtech, digital health, and life science.

Keeping up with the startup ecosystem

Rev1 needs to keep up with industry trends to identify emerging market opportunities and technologies for investment. They also want to provide timely information and deep domain expertise to startups that could benefit from their years of industry knowledge. Staying on top of various industries and where they are heading takes a lot of time to research and monitor.

Sifting for contextually relevant information took up too much time

Before finding Feedly, Rev1 had a system for keeping up with industry trends. But, it involved manual processes, like jumping from website to website, opening tabs, bookmarking for later, and sifting through headlines for relevant news. Rev1’s process relied on finding news from known publications and experts in their network. They wanted to reduce blind spots and avoid missing key information on the latest trends.

Aggregating and sharing articles across the team was a clunky process

To send a weekly newsletter with relevant news and insights, Rev1 kept a system of bookmarks and email drafts to aggregate key snippets and links. It worked, but they would rather spend that time synthesizing the information than organizing it. They started looking for tools that would help consolidate their efforts, parse for relevant information, and share insights.

First, Matt and his team organized all their sources in one place

In Rev1’s foodtech Feed, they follow:

• Industry publications like Digital Insurance and Coverager
• Insurtech blogs like Insurance Thought Leadership
• Keyword Alerts for “machine learning” and “insurance”

Then Rev1 asked Leo to spot relevant insurtech topics, trends, and startups

Matt and Rev1 wanted to refine the information that showed up in their Feeds and filter out the signal from the noise. That’s where Leo — your AI research assistant — came in.

In their insurtech Feed, Rev1 asked Leo to look for significant business events like funding rounds related to claims, underwriting, or P&C insurance. With the Business Event skill, Leo looks for mergers & acquisitions, new product launches, or fundraising events. If an insurtech startup raised a $10 million funding round, Rev1 would know about it.

Matt created a Mute Filter to get rid of noise. Leo now removes anything related to health insurance in their insurtech Feed.

Matt also used a Like Board Priority to ask Leo to spot articles similar to ones they had already saved in their “Insurtech Opportunities” Board. This helps Rev1 cover blind spots if an industry-relevant article is published by an unbeknownst source.

They started sharing research findings with Team Boards

Matt created Team Boards around topics like insurtech, healthcare, foodtech, Venture Capital, and Columbus, OH startups. He used these shared spaces to save articles, add Notes and Highlights, and tag teammates that should see specific content.

Before Feedly, Rev1’s manual curation process felt like swimming upstream against a flood of information. By optimizing their information gathering process and taking advantage of Leo’s ability to filter and prioritize, they cut research time by 50%.

Using Leo Priorities meant that Rev1 could follow general publications like TechCrunch and still get hyper-focused information

Before Leo, the Rev1 team would also scan broad sources like TechCrunch or VentureBeat for pertinent articles. These publications cover a wide variety of industries beyond insurtech, so parsing through the information would take some time.

But by setting up Priorities for the specific topics they care about (for example: insurance innovation), Leo will place topically relevant articles on Rev1’s Priority tab. They can now continue to follow wide-reaching sources like TechCrunch with a keen eye for industry-specific intelligence.

Finding investment opportunities and partnerships through Feedly

Now that the Rev1 team doesn’t spend hours wading through open browser tabs and email chains full of links, they have more time to focus on the content of the news. With refined Feeds and sources, Rev1 can keep a much closer eye on who to invest in and which partnerships to pursue.

The smarter Leo gets, the more Rev1 can synthesize and share information. Matt’s excited about the possibilities: “We set the foundation for something that could be highly-efficient and effective moving forward.”