Why infrastructure and data are integral to Flybridge’s operational model

As investors in the tech sector, the team at Flybridge witnesses firsthand on a daily basis how technology and data can amplify output, results, and reach. “Already from an investment perspective, we’re firm believers in that augmentation,” says Daniel. Moreover, Flybridge is a 10-person team with only six investment team members, managing $1 billion across 100+ companies—that’s some impressive math. “We’re talking about a large portfolio, a small team, and some high ambition,” Daniel explains. “We acknowledge that we’d simply be capped or limited without technology to enhance our capabilities.”

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That awareness has helped shape the firm’s operational model. For example, as Daniel points out, the firm’s partners have been investing for more than three decades. “Their networks are far-reaching, and those relationships are essential; but a team of six can only cultivate their connections so far. Even if we leveraged each of our relationships to its fullest, attended every event possible, and networked around the clock, we’d still miss a lot of opportunities. And in this industry, missing too many opportunities fundamentally compromises your returns.” 

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Knowing they can't just solve for one variable, Flybridge views data as a means to systematically scale their networks. “With data, the six of us can tap into networks beyond our immediate reach, or those within our reach that weren’t flagged for whatever reason. That's where Harmonic comes in.” 

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“Harmonic solves two challenges: a crowded market and a shortage of information”  

Daniel says thanks to Julia Maltby, a principal at Flybridge, the team realized a few years ago that “given the variety of online sources available for company data, sourcing technologies had become critical for any firm’s success. This is true regardless of the size of the investment team.” Initially, Flybridge considered building something in-house, but given the amount of time and effort it would take to build and maintain, “we opted to explore external options. Our expertise is in the selection, investment, and support side of the business. It just didn’t make sense to shift our focus from there.”

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Flybridge is an early-stage investment fund with a focus on AI. As such, the firm faced two significant sourcing challenges: an increasingly-saturated market to sift through, and a shortage of information about companies at their earliest stages. “Not all stealth-founders provide a description of what they’re developing,” Daniel explains. “Later-stage investors benefit from the fact that the companies they evaluate are somewhat public. You can track financial performance, market presence, and operational details in the news. But when you’re funding at the early stage, finding those founders can be exceptionally hard to do.” 

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Harmonic uses a variety of data sources—legal filings, business registries, social platforms, and more—to uncover the earliest-stage companies long before other providers do. “In the AI space, Harmonic is flagging great results for us,” Daniel says. “This is one of the heavy lifts the platform performs for us—especially uncovering highly relevant and interesting profiles that are currently in stealth mode.”

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Balancing broad sector reviews with high-conviction searches

Given that most tech companies are currently investing in AI in one form or another, Flybridge’s investable universe is seemingly vast. VC firms in this space often run the risk of sacrificing accuracy—and ultimately, conviction—through overly-broad searches, creating lists they can’t prioritize or manage and overlooking the best-fit, highest-quality investment opportunities in the meantime. Harmonic has enabled Flybridge to strike a balance between extensive industry awareness and targeted, high-conviction searches. 

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Harmonic’s search features allow firms to filter companies by funding, headcount, founder and team experience, and hundreds of positive or negative keywords that align (or don’t) with their theses. Investors can connect a Saved Search in Harmonic to the firm’s internal CRM, which then updates daily with new companies that match their investment criteria. “For example,” Daniel explains, “we’re tracking people who are transitioning out of the leading first wave of AI/ML companies—Weights & Biases, for example. A lot of employees from those companies are now leaving to launch their own ventures, so we curate founder searches with filters for past companies.” 

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Flybridge’s investment approach also includes a geographical focus—the East Coast broadly, and the New York and Boston area more specifically (“our edge and our competitive advantage is there,” Daniel explains). He says that filtering by geo allows the firm “to tap into local networks—people coming out of NYU, Columbia, Harvard or MIT research labs who might be launching their own startups. Harmonic allows us to keep a finger on the pulse of as narrow a universe as we want. Ultimately, this means more actionable searches that yield the highest returns.” 

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Daniel recounts a time that Harmonic surfaced a profile through a Saved Search. “I was tracking employee exits from a handful of companies,” he recalls: “Who was leaving those first- and second-wave AI companies to embark on something new?” He reached out to one of the profiles Harmonic served up, and the founder responded. During their exchange, they discovered that the founder’s co-founder had been involved with one of Flybridge’s portfolio companies and was connected with Jesse Middleton, one of the partners at Flybridge. “At the time,” Daniel adds, “it turns out they were open to receiving more capital.”

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With a well-established relationship already in place, Flybridge invested in Arcee.AI at the seed stage. “They recently raised a large Series A round—over $20 million—and we doubled down there, too. That’s a very exciting and successful organization we might not have discovered on our own—and more importantly, in time—even with that relationship in place. Yet Harmonic recognized that that founder was starting something new. It pointed, and we looked.”

Monitoring pipelines and tracking deal flow with integrations

When it comes to pipeline management, Flybridge is achieving impressive results by integrating relevant data from Harmonic into its Airtable instance. Daniel’s team worked with Harmonic to create an integration “where we can process and review profiles much more efficiently and connect that data with other internal systems.” This integration allows the investment team to spend energy on the most exciting opportunities. Re-engaging founders at the right time, based on tractional signals, network connections, or other data points, is vital to running a lean team with ambitions for outsized results.

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In Airtable, Flybridge manages its pipeline and monitors key information about prospective portfolio companies thanks to data pulled from Harmonic. “Harmonic created and enabled all those integrations,” Daniel adds.

Evaluating success signals for its data platform

One thing that’s clear to Daniel and the team at Flybridge is that “the funds that are leveraging data and technology will outperform in significant ways. I’m a firm believer that human relationships will always be the cornerstone of successful investing; but I'm also a firm believer in tech as an amplifier of the existing talent knowledge base,” Daniel says. “Now, generative AI is a force-multiplier when it comes to the value—and the possibilities—of that data. On its own, this will have a substantial long-term impact on returns.”

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In evaluating the value of a sourcing tool like Harmonic, Daniel emphasizes the importance of the team's support alongside the significant ROI from a well-selected investment. Harmonic conducted several working sessions with Flybridge to set up the firm’s lists, tune them, and share best practices. “We began with a method we considered effective,” Daniel recalls, “but the sessions were so helpful because the Harmonic team offered a wealth of knowledge about alternate approaches. And to date, whenever I have a question about any aspect of the platform, the response time is consistently less than an hour. The team has always been incredibly helpful, providing answers, guidance, and best practices.” 

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When it comes to tangible ROI, Daniel concedes that it’s difficult to assess until the firm generates cash returns. “So you have to take the signals as you see them in the short-term. What I can say is that Harmonic has identified some companies we surely wouldn’t have uncovered ourselves in time; we’ve invested in some of those companies. And at the end of the day, a single fund-returner is going to drive 30, 40, 50 times the value of the tool used to source it.” 

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Flybridge renewed its contract with Harmonic at the end of the first year precisely because the short-term value was already clear.