Standard Metrics serves as a centralized hub for VC firms’ data (from investment details to portfolio company financials). Historically, we’ve offered our customers various out-of-the-box reports to visualize this data. We’ve also prioritized easy exports along with an Excel add-in and robust API to power quick reporting on other, more customizable data visualization platforms.

Despite these existing tools, our customers continued to demand a higher degree of reporting customizability within the Standard Metrics platform. They wanted to share data in many different formats (presentations, one-sheets, one-off analysis, custom charts, etc.) for many different stakeholders without leaving Standard Metrics.

We considered building out each of the various elements needed to power these tools in-house, but wanted to give our users this functionality as quickly as possible. So we instead began our search for an embedded analytics tool to integrate into our platform — one that would enable our customers to go beyond what we provide out-of-the-box and would help customers easily build their own custom cuts of data, visualizations, and dashboards. One of our key criteria was a flexible UI to empower technical and non-technical users across the firm to answer their most critical portfolio questions. We also needed a tool with an ability to integrate with multiple data warehouses, strong data security, easy data exportability, and AI-related features. Omni, a BI provider fresh off a Series B led by ICONIQ, met the mark.

We’re excited to discuss how this integration will change the Standard Metrics platform, and further our commitment to AI.

Introducing our new portfolio intelligence offering

Standard Metrics will now enable firms to explore, manipulate, visualize, report, and monitor their portfolio companies’ data via a focused reporting and dashboarding solution, all within our platform. On top of saving time and making analysis easier, keeping data on platform also adds to data security (maintaining permissions and traceability unlike an export) as well as metric governance (where data follows the logic and definitions defined in Standard Metrics).

This tool is built with flexibility and easy UX in mind, so non-technical users can also build the visualizations they need. Users can easily drag-and-drop the metrics they want examined into the formats they want them examined in, for example, pulling time into an X-axis and monthly revenue into a Y-axis to form a line chart showing a portco’s revenue over time.

New features are helping our customers to:

• Pull unique cuts of their data to highlight the metrics that matter most to them, and store these cuts in perpetuity to refer back to (rather than building net new each quarter).
• Turn their portfolio company data into easily-built, custom visualizations to instantly answer one-off asks from LPs or support unique analysis.
• Supplement charts with notes explaining qualitative reasons for quantitative performance. These notes can be shared across the firm, so that everyone from analysts to GPs are on the same page about portfolio performance.
• Share insights with others outside the firm via downloadable charts for presentations, automatic email or slack deliverables, and view-level access invites to dashboards.

AI-powered insights

Leveraging Omni’s AI chatbot, we now enable our customers to ask questions of their data using natural language. For example, simply ask “How does XYZ company’s monthly revenue look over time?” for the helper to build the same chart for you. And because our AI chat is backed by Omni’s built-in semantic model, we’re able to better control the AI’s input and outputs to provide more reliable AI answers built on the context of your business.

Have an idea about a further cut you want visualized (e.g. How does that monthly revenue compare to other companies in my portfolio)? You can also ask the AI bot consecutive questions.

What’s next

With Omni, we’re speeding up data reporting and exploration on Standard Metrics, empowering non-technical users to build insights, and giving the answers to questions that VCs have about their portfolio’s financial health, with just a few clicks.

On top of Omni’s AI-powered insights, Standard Metrics also launched our own AI-powered portfolio company analyst this quarter to help with data summarization at the company level. In real language, ask the bot how a company has performed over time or how it compares to other companies within its industry.

Our advanced analytics currently allows users to analyze their companies performance based on data in Standard Metrics. In the future, we plan to incorporate more fund level analytics and act as an integration hub for all data across a firm.

Get in touch if you’d like to learn more.