About Lux Capital

Lux Capital is a firm based in NYC and Silicon Valley with more than $5 billion in AUM, specializing in investments in the emerging science and technology sectors. Lux invests across companies of all stages and sizes: notable investments among their 200+ portfolio include Anduril, Ramp, Hugging Face, Hadrian, and Applied Intuition.

The Problem

Prior to Standard Metrics, Lux Capital handled the majority of both portfolio company data collection and portfolio review in-house manually.

In the past, Lux Capital used email to gather data. Every quarter, the team needed to test their email sends, adjust those sends to fix broken links, and update individual contacts for every portfolio company. Each of these processes required time-consuming manual work.

“We did our best to keep portfolio company contacts updated, but it was inevitable that emails would bounce back because the person no longer worked at the company, and we wouldn’t have another contact,” explained Lux Accounting Manager Bradley Gritsch. “There were times when the email would simply break and we didn’t know what was going wrong.”

There were also a variety of time-consuming processes for portfolio review, from monitoring completion rates manually via Google Sheets to copy-pasting data company-by-company into tear sheets.

The team looked at a leading competitor, but “quickly realized that the product did not do what we were hoping,” explained Gritsch. “It required the same types of actions we had to do via email, but it was less user-friendly. ”

The Solution

After a glowing review of Standard Metrics from another customer that Lux Capital trusted, the team turned our way.

With Standard Metrics, data collection has become fully automated for Lux: companies sign up for the platform and are automatically notified by Standard Metrics on when and how to share their information.

Standard Metrics also tracks completion rates and stores information about all portfolio companies in one easy-to-view spot, filterable by fund. Standard Metrics’ Excel plug-in functionality, meanwhile, helps the firm automatically sync the data they need from the platform into their custom tear sheets sans copy-paste. Standard Metrics data is also used in their quarterly reports to LPs.

“Standard Metrics is dynamic,” said Lux VP of Finance Samantha Cho. “It’s easy for us to wiggle. We can do anything: dice and slice data however we want it.”

The Results

As hoped, the team has saved significant time in data collection and portfolio review.

“Standard Metrics has cut down at least 25% of the time I spend preparing tear sheets,” said Gritsch.

“It used to take me so much time to find data in Google Sheets because I had to click the link of each company to find what I needed,” added Lux Capital CFO Segolene Scarborough. “Now with Standard Metrics, all I have to do is filter by the fund and all the companies and data points I need are in front of my eyes.”

Not only is data collection taking the Lux team less time, but more portfolio companies are responding to Lux Capital’s information requests than ever before.

“There are some bigger companies that would never respond to our emails and yet have been providing responses within Standard Metrics,” said Gritsch. “It’s not something that we expected. Now they provide information on a timely basis.”

Standard Metrics also makes portfolio data collection “more efficient for portfolio companies,” added Scarborough. “They don’t have to fill in the information multiple times, because they already do it for their other VCs that are on the platform.”

What’s Next

After seeing success with Standard Metrics, the Lux Capital team recently decided to double down and expand their contract to include Advanced Analytics, our portfolio intelligence offering that enables firms to explore, manipulate, visualize, report, and monitor their portfolio companies’ data via a focused reporting and dashboarding solution, all within our platform.

The driving force for the decision was a desire to expand usage of Standard Metrics beyond the finance team to the investment team.

“I didn’t want to wait another six months to renew,” said Scarborough. “Our general partners have asked for years to have one place to go where they can see — in one view, in one click — all of their investment data in one place. I want to show them that Standard Metrics is not just a finance team product, but an investment team product.”

While the Lux Capital team’s focus will be on increasing GP adoption of the platform over the upcoming months, continuing to improve LP reporting via Standard Metrics is also something on the team’s mind.

“Every time we think about revamping a process, we think, ‘maybe Standard Metrics can do that,’” said Scarborough. “Standard Metrics is on our mind every time.”