Selling through the cap table

Rillet’s sales motion works backward from the investor: find the strongest funds backing Rillet’s best-fit companies, identify the people at those funds worth knowing, and earn introductions to their portfolios. The fund’s seat on a portfolio company’s cap table becomes the path in.

Tyler runs the first step through Harmonic’s MCP, the server that gives AI agents direct access to Harmonic’s company and people data. He works from inside his own agent ecosystem, describing what he wants in plain language: pull the funds whose portfolios match Rillet’s ICP, then the portfolio companies themselves, then the contacts worth reaching. “The MCP is what makes it click,” Tyler explains. “I can pull the data, find the companies that fit us, and get to the right people, all without leaving my workflow.” Harmonic’s coverage runs to more than 35 million companies and over 195 million professionals, deep enough to map a fund’s full portfolio and the operators inside it.

Which person to approach at the fund matters. “Some of these funds are big and bulky, with a lot of bureaucracy in them,” Tyler says. That bureaucracy is worth navigating, because once Rillet is in the room, the product wins on its own merits: “We know the product sells itself, so the game is getting in front of the right decision-maker at the right company.” The first name Rillet needs sits a level up, at the fund: whoever can open the door. “I just tell Harmonic, here’s the kind of person I’m looking for at this fund. Can you help me find them?”

When he needs a contact directly, Harmonic’s Chrome extension pulls it from a LinkedIn profile without a trip into the console. Prepping outreach for an upcoming event, Tyler worked through a list of PE contacts and pulled their emails directly from their profiles. “The extension just gives me the data,” he says. “I don’t even have to touch the UI.”

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Scoring a fund’s portfolio against Rillet’s ICP

A fund might back fifty companies, but only a handful are the right size and stage to need what Rillet sells. Scout, Harmonic’s research agent, surfaces that handful. Tyler points Scout at an investor’s portfolio and it scores each company against Rillet’s ICP. He recently ran General Atlantic’s portfolio this way with a simple instruction: “Pull every company General Atlantic backs and grade them on how well they each match our customer profile.” Scout takes some coaching, Tyler notes. He feeds it Rillet’s disqualifiers, then lets it sort: “For example, I told it we’re not a great fit for construction companies, or companies over ten thousand employees, and it boxed the portfolio into good fits and bad fits.”

That’s the first pass. The ranked output goes into an internal system that scores each company on brand and ICP fit, with Scout’s initial pull as the raw material. Harmonic finds and sorts the field; Rillet’s own model makes the call.

Scout has earned heavier use with the Rillet team since its revamp, including quick reads on where a fund’s conviction sits. If Insight Partners is backing a cluster hard, Tyler explains, that’s a cluster of companies scaling fast enough to be in Rillet's market.

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The data layer Tyler trusts

Tyler maps the prospecting tools onto the finance stack he knows. “I see legacy GTM tools like I see NetSuite: the big, lumbering thing that’s always been there, a necessary evil. Crunchbase is like Sage: people don’t necessarily want to go there, and they don’t always get the best data.” Rillet runs Clay for enrichment, too, but the scoring lands unevenly. Harmonic sits somewhere else for him. On investor and company data, Tyler is unequivocal: “On the investor side, it really crushes it, and with the portfolio companies too. It’s really the cream of the crop on data quality.”

That reliance runs past his own desk. “The rest of the team leans into Harmonic heavily as well,” Tyler says. “I personally feel like I can’t go without it.”