Choosing a Dealflow Management System

How to you manage the leads, due-diligence and deals process at your VC?

For the past two years I’ve been using Sevanta Dealflow which is great, especially for early stage funs who are reviewing hundreds of deals each year and want to make sure all deals are logged. The biggest advantage in Sevanta is the email integration – you can send an email to the system that will create a new deal with all the information that is in the email. At Blumberg Capital – this made us log almost all deals and therefore was very valuable (before we almost didn’t log deals at all…).

However, the Sevanta look and feel isn’t great and the user experience is far from intuitive. Now as I am moving to a new VC fund, a fund that is smaller and will look at less deals each year, I wanted to check out the alternatives and see which system would be best.

Here are the few I’ll be looking at – would love to get comments and feedback:

• SalesForce for VC – I have a demo account, so far seems way too heavy – too many unneeded features, such as goal tracking, capital calls and others. Have customize-able dashboards so maybe after I play around with it more I’ll be able to get more value out of it.
• Podio + Flowfeed – saw this one on Quora – will be setting a demo to see it
• Pipedrive – this isn’t specifically for PE/VC so will likely need more customization, but I heard good things
• Gust – dealflow management that gives startups the opportunity to contact you through the system, not sure that’s what I’d like but I set a demo with them today
• Intralinks Dealnexus – looks promising from its website, but still need to check
• V3 for Investment – looks relevant, demoing this system as well
• eFront for Fund managers – another demo to schedule

Would love to hear what you are using, and if there are any other systems worth checking.

Liron