Outperforming on coverage: “Harmonic was serving up 100% of the companies we had missed”

Because of the team’s confidence in data, Blossom builds a lot of in-house tools to uncover the most compelling opportunities in Europe. They also manage relationships with multiple data providers to ensure broad coverage. “But over time,” Nick recalls, “we observed that there were certain early-stage European companies that were slipping through the cracks and going unnoticed. Our providers weren’t providing full coverage after all, and we wanted more robust support so we didn’t have to build all the tools ourselves.” That’s when they reached out to Harmonic, along with a handful of other providers, with the goal of comparing platforms. 

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Nick describes Harmonic as having “outperformed those other providers in their total coverage of Europe.” To evaluate, the firm provided Harmonic with a list of companies they had discovered early stage funding through word of mouth but existing data providers didn’t know about. “It was a simple question,” Nick explains: “Did Harmonic have coverage our existing providers didn’t? Of the list we shared, Harmonic had a 95% hit rate. By the time we set up the integration, they were serving up 100% of the companies we had missed.” Nick says the evaluation proved that the Harmonic team was “taking coverage as seriously as we were. There was a lot of overlap between what Harmonic was building and what we were trying to achieve internally. So it was a no-brainer to partner.”

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Engineering hours saved: “We’ve offloaded a lot of tool stack maintenance and headaches to Harmonic” 

Since Harmonic now provides the data that the Blossom team once spent hours every week building and supporting tools to scrape—company descriptions, headcount data, executive and operator details, social traction, and more—“there wasn’t much point in us maintaining that infrastructure anymore,” Nick says. “That was an enormous burden we were able to offload.” After all, the team’s core value is the proprietary models and algorithms it builds on top of the data to flag companies of interest; and because precious engineering resources are no longer wasted on building scrapers, merging duplicate companies, and rudimentary discovery of company information, they can focus more time on signals that help them find the best companies to invest in.

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"With Harmonic, we have confidence in the quality of the data that’s coming in,” Nick explains, “so we can spend our time building more complicated models, knowing the data we’ll apply them to is both accurate and exhaustive.” He adds that the bandwidth the team got back by “automating some of those early processes, including discovery” is also going toward more interesting and creative approaches to their internal scrapers—“scrapers that may not be as robust as Harmonic’s, but are more specific to the tasks and use cases we're exploring.” What’s more, “it’s time with which we can be talking to founders and supporting our portfolio companies."

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Bulk data delivery: “Our system initially couldn’t handle the sheer amount of data Harmonic has”

One of Blossom’s primary use cases for Harmonic is bulk data share, which Nick refers to as “data dump.” This feature gives customers access to the platform’s entire universe of company and people records, updated on a weekly basis. Those tables are ingested directly into firms’ data warehouses, whether they use BigQuery, Snowflake, GCS, or AWS. Nick says that when the team first integrated this feature, they realized they were going to have to scale their systems internally to handle what he calls “the sheer mountain of data Harmonic was able to provide. The first time we ported the data over, our data pipelines were underprovisioned and crashed. It was a tremendous realization that Harmonic had more data than any provider we’ve worked with.” 

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With startup data written to their warehouse, Blossom can enrich existing company records or create brand new fields in their CRM (or other data destination) with data that Harmonic uniquely has. Nick describes “data dump” as “perfect for teams with data warehouse setups. It was easy to set up; we integrated in a matter of minutes; and now our warehouse is auto-ingesting data without any efforts on our part.”

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Harmonic’s data fields: “They’re some of the best data points for early companies” 

Nick describes Harmonic as “increasingly one of our only sources of data for the earliest companies.” He underscores the platform’s people data and contact fields as particularly helpful for the Blossom team. Harmonic’s Highlights flag relevant experience in team members’ backgrounds—Seasoned Founder, Top University, Major Tech Company Experience, Deep Technical Background, Prior VC-Backed Founder, Prior Exit, and more. “The comprehensive nature of Harmonic’s people data is remarkable,” says Nick; “it’s something we were initially blown away by. We struggled to find any provider with that depth of information, and the data enrichment feature means that people information is regularly updated and enhanced without our own scrapers” 

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Nick adds that “access to emails through our core data provider is a nice-to-have, because that contact information is closely integrated with the data we’re already looking at.” Harmonic serves up both team emails and company emails; and with the platform’s LinkedIn Connections feature, which shows who in the firm has connections with a given company, Blossom immediately knows its best path into a conversation.

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Harmonic’s AI-powered tags slice companies by industry, technology, and customer type. Nick says the Blossom team uses these for their own set of internal language models. “We train our own models using the tags Harmonic provides. It’s really helpful to bootstrap models quickly.” 

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On the value of data: “Harmonic both levels the playing field and raises the bar” 

As far as the team at Blossom sees it, VC firms are realizing they can’t get away without some kind of data provider at this point. “It’s just too difficult to compete without it,” Nick says. “And while there’s a lot of edge to having something in-house and really understanding it technically,” he adds, “if you don’t have the capacity to build and maintain everything internally, you want a partner with a robust platform. We’ve definitely found that in Harmonic.”

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Nick believes data is table stakes for an effective sourcing operation, and the modeling & scoring is where firms can differentiate. “There are well over 10 million European companies on LinkedIn,” he explains, “and while there’s a lot of value in having access to that entire universe, the most potent value lies in what you do with that access, how you filter through the data with your own models and algorithms to find your own best-fit companies. In that sense, Harmonic both levels the playing field and raises the bar in terms of our own internal processes. Ultimately, that makes us a stronger firm.”