Case study: How Odense Seed and Venture optimised their workflow

The Challenge

Odense Seed & Venture is a single point of contact for investments in Odense-based clusters that focuses on bridging the gap between startups and investors with main areas of interest in the robotics and medical cannabis industries.

For many years, Odense had worked adequately with their own screening and pipeline management system. However, as they witnessed an increase in the number of deals received, it became clear that their existing system was creating inefficiencies and was not scalable. An increase in volume from handling tens of cases to hundreds made them realise there must be a better, more transparent and efficient way of sharing information with investor and partners - something that would reduce the time spent on managing the deal flow.

Odense was aware of the Dealum platform through the other major Danish investor networks that are already using the platform. It was evident that their workflows were largely improved through adopting a more comprehensive and intuitive solution. Upon review of the functionality built into the platform, Odense recognised a wider opportunity for themselves to improve investor collaboration through the new communication touch-points - a key focus area and ultimately the biggest selling point for them.

The Outcome

Switching from an internal system to Dealum could have been a major task, but Odense found their onboarding process internally to be intuitive and fairly easy. As many Danish investor networks were already using the platform, Odense had the advantage of being able to have a dialogue with Odense Seed & Venture partners - DanBAN, Keystones and Business Angels of Syddanmark - to gather insight on how they have set up and manage their funnel, but also more general information on how the platform is working out for them.

Kicking things off with Dealum’s onboarding call helped Odense to understand the main areas of functionality and focus giving insight into how they could embed their processes into the platform to create a better experience for everyone involved. In hindsight, onboarding their members from the beginning may have been a more inclusive option to collect feedback in real-time about their deal room setup. Odense Seed & Venture currently continues to onboard the members. Likewise, completing the application form from the companies’ perspective may have made the process more structured and professional. Additional value is provided by the events feature on the Dealum platform. The events functionality makes it easy and efficient to communicate with investors, companies, and partners about the activities in Odense - both on the smaller events, but also on the annual Odense Investor Summit.

Having now used Dealum for almost a year, the benefits continue to build. Odense Seed and Venture continues to further optimise their workload to focus more on the relationship-building aspects of their work rather than spending hours on managing the cases as they did before. With Dealum taking care of the tedious tasks, Odense can now create more value for the companies and investors they work with.

The benefit of improving the operations around screening, pipeline management, and technical details is that they can improve their organisation’s overall performance through increasing the number of deals they manage daily and provide a transparent, collaborative platform that is accessible to their companies, partners, and investors.

The Verdict

Martyna Waliszewska, Investment Manager at Odense Seed & Venture, wishes that they had joined the platform sooner.

From the Odense Seed & Venture’s perspective, implementation of the Dealum platform has been an upgrade to our daily work. The fact that all the major investor networks in Denmark are using this platform brings even more collaboration opportunities in the future and gathers the entire early-stage investing universe in one place.

As Dealum keeps adding new features, hopefully, more opportunities arise from that and Odense Seed and Venture is looking forward to seeing what the future brings.

Odense Seed & Venture Fact Sheet