Systemisation and Pattern Recognition

Our screening process begins with leveraging our extensive experience from reviewing tens of thousands of startups, while making over 100 personal startup and fund investments, located throughout the world. We’ve also invested in numerous Unicorns so we know what they look like before it’s obvious. 

When we think a startup looks highly interesting and meets CP Ventures investment thematic, we use a proprietary scoring system and extensive, yet highly efficient, screening and due diligence process. 

Our scoring system reviews 18 key areas of the business, with a heavy weighting on three key areas: Problem, Solution & Team

High performance is not just about picking winners, but how the investment and wider portfolio is constructed. CP Ventures has opted to focus on high performance over building the next mega fund. We have implemented the following portfolio attributes to help ensure we achieve outsized returns for our investors:

• Pre-Seed & Seed stage – Higher returns are possible the earlier an investment is made.
• Conviction style – Focus efforts on investing earlier rather than diluting with larger checks as valuations rise.
• Boutique size – Keeping the fund small so that early stage checks are meaningful on the Fund’s performance.
• Rapid deployment – Make investor money work faster by conducting all first round investments within 12 months, rather than the usual 4 years.
• Multi-sector – Investments spread across multiple sectors to capture multiple growth trends and diversify.
• International – Investing where the best opportunities exist, especially the US where the majority of western denominated Unicorns are still created.
• Thematic – Focus on the technology of the future as identified by the 4th Industrial Revolution as those sectors are naturally growing a high speeds.
• Power Law – A clear understanding that high performing VC funds exhibit a power law style return and optimised to take advantage of this. 
• Secret sauce – Investment at the Pre-Seed & Seed stage often allows for much more flexibility than later stages, and we’ve developed unique investment and follow-on structuring that can improve our investment returns significantly, while also helping our startups and being founder friendly.