Squark for PE Firms: Use AI to Scale Investment Portfolios

Private Equity (PE) firms are excellent at building economies of scale in their portfolio companies and across their portfolios.  Scale is what creates value in PE because scale eliminates redundancies, reducing cost, and increasing margin.  ROI, thus, often demands scale. With automated data science tools like Squark, it has never been easier and more innovative to use AI to scale investment portfolios and accelerate growth.

Increasing the Power of Your Portfolio Scale with Augmented Intelligence

The ability to scale is helpful for the adoption of AI and ML too.  After all, AI technology and talent can be expensive, so PE firms must have an AI technology that can sc8ale to generate a return using their existing investments in people.  In AI that means having a system that the ops teams, analysts, and associates can use both, at the PE firm and even within each portfolio company.  The goal, of course, is to produce the right predictive insights at the right time using the right models and algorithms on data that you already have.  Leading PE firms are reaching this goal today with Squark.  We help scale AI across a PE firm’s operations and within its portfolio companies while empowering employees and ensuring maximum value from your investments in data.

How Squark Uses AI to Scale Investment Portfolios, A Use Case: 

The firm seeks to unlock value from a portfolio SaaS company, but they face a challenge: how to predict and forecast the likely demand for the company’s various products to hit retention rate targets of 129%. This question is complex not only because of always-present customer risk, macro and micro economic trends, systematic and unsystematic risk, market trends, and more.

In today’s unusual times this SaaS company’s consumers have likely changed their behaviors; the way they buy, when, where and how they work, and their overall usage and consumption habits. So have the SaaS company’s vendors, workforce, services mix, and partners. To forecast retention, the company must determine if these changes and all the related data are meaningful and will persist and have an impact on future net retention. Pre-AI, before Squark, the best the PE firm could do was extrapolate a range of possible forecasts based on historical data, BI, and descriptive statistics, then map out the implications for demand. 

The game has changed with Squark.

With Squark, this PE firm can now help or enable the SaaS company to create a far more sophisticated, accurate, and dynamic set of models to predict and forecast SaaS demand. The AI-powered predictions can be simulated across different market forecasts and using new data as it comes in.  The PE firms own first-party data, second, and third-party data is instantly applied to understanding the drivers of retention.  Squark’s AI is used to model and simulate how a set of choices might impact the SaaS company: 

• How to determine which customers are at risk; 
• What to do about it; 
• How the company’s operational choices, workforce, and partners will contribute (or not) to the net retention goal 

As new data comes in across company systems, Squark’s API automatically ingests it to keep relearning and updating predictions and forecasts on the schedule you need. Squark’s explainability surfaces the insights from your data, so you can understand what is driving the outcomes. The data is sent to the systems you need it to be or use Squark’s no-code UX. 

With Squark’s AI, the PE firm and its portfolio SaaS company keep up with the customer, the market, and the competitors.  AI monitors inputs, guides operations, and informs actions and decisions with predictive insight that meet retention goals. As a result, the PE firm’s revenue growth optimizes as Squark synthesizes pan-portfolio data based on probabilities and finds new insights to predict future performance and action to create new value.

Accelerate growth with Squark by Using AI to Scale Your Investment Portfolios

25% of PE firms are actively deploying AI strategies. Fewer are applying AI as we described above to gain both a cross-portfolio view and to scale AI ops across portfolio companies.  Learn more about how we can help you reach your goals by meeting with us.