How Yeo Ventures Uses Beauhurst from Deal Origination to Closure
Beauhurst is a life-saver. It frees up a lot of our time, allowing us to focus on actually adding value to the companies we invest in.
Yeo Ventures is the venture capital arm of Yeo Valley, investing in early-stage businesses involved in the food and agriculture supply chain.
Working with Beauhurst delivered:
More outbound
leads generated
An increase in
deals closed
Delayed the
need for an analyst
Why Yeo Ventures chose Beauhurst
Time-savings and efficiencies: As a small, ambitious team, access to Beauhurst enables them to punch above their weight by saving them time throughout the investment process.
Targeted deal origination: Using Beauhurst searches, the team identifies and reaches out to relevant companies that fit their specific criteria.
Due diligence and benchmarking: Yeo Ventures use the Beauhurst platform to research potential investments, including benchmarking against competitors and analysing comparable transactions.
Portfolio management: Using Beauhurst Collections and monitoring features, investors at Yeo Ventures stay up to date with their portfolio companies and the broader competitive landscape.
The Challenge
Making investments requires several stages, from origination to due diligence. And the team at Yeo Ventures, with their ambitious plans to drive change in the food system, manages every element of that process.
We sat down with Chris Gale, Investment Manager at Yeo Ventures, who explained: “As a small but growing investment team, we’re tasked with all elements of deal management, which includes origination, qualifying inbound, benchmarking opportunities, sourcing co-investors and conducting due diligence — meaning we’re all very time poor.”
For Chris and the rest of the team, “The mission is investing in businesses driving the transition to a natural healthy food system, from farm to fork.” To do this, Chris (a seasoned Beauhurst user in his previous roles) turned to Beauhurst and introduced our data platform to the rest of the team.
The Solution
“The first thing you need to do is get Beauhurst.”
Saving time on research and valuation
Finding and qualifying potential investment opportunities through conventional means — trawling LinkedIn and Companies House — can be a huge time sink.
Chris and the investment team at Yeo Ventures get the most out of our platform by creating detailed, specific searches to reveal only highly relevant opportunities. This drastically reduces the workload involved in deal origination, enabling them to do more with fewer resources.
Chris explains: “The Advanced Search function, along with industry reports and high-growth lists, allows us to efficiently analyse market trends in order to be more targeted with our outbound marketing activities, resulting in higher quality deal flow.”
For Chris, being equipped with knowledge on the go is making a huge difference: “We use the platform on our mobile devices while we’re out of the office at events or between meetings to quickly build a clear picture of the company we’re dealing with, like a company’s financial performance, ownership structure, transaction history, and competitive landscape.”
Simplifying benchmarking
With a wealth of Beauhurst insights across the UK market all in one place, Yeo Ventures’ investment team can analyse comparative deals in target industries with speed and ease, enabling them to make valuation and investment decisions efficiently.
Chris adds, “Beauhurst provides access to reliable and up-to-date transaction comps, which is essential for us in our valuation process.”
Adding value to their portfolio
Yeo Ventures’ investment philosophy is to add value and support to its portfolio in many ways, one of which is to provide valuable industry insights and market reports.
For Chris and the team, access to the latest company data through our platform and reports enables them to share insights, industry trends, and financials with businesses in their portfolio — adding value beyond their own team.
Chris explained, “We are ‘value-add investors’ rather than passive sector generalist investors. Beauhurst helps us deliver insights that add meaningful value to our portfolio companies.”
Finding co-funding opportunities
Preferring to co-invest in companies, Yeo Ventures uses Beauhurst to access UK transactions, as well as the advisors and funds involved in the fundraising.
Chris comments, “Our preference is to not be the only investor in a round, so our team uses Beauhurst to find relevant co-investors for potential deals. We do this by analysing other funds to see which have invested in similar companies.”
And as a specialist investor in agritech, regenerative farming, and other transformational businesses in the food supply chain, Yeo Ventures uses Beauhurst to research funds that participate in similar deals to find potential co-investors easily.
The Results
“The companies we’re looking at are increasingly European-based, so it's exciting that Beauhurst is expanding to Germany.”
From initial research through to deal completion, the team at Yeo Ventures credits Beauhurst as a critical driver of efficiencies in their growing team.
Adding to this, Chris comments, “It’s delayed the need for an analyst, to a certain extent. We can now do our job much more efficiently because Beauhurst pulls everything together in one place.”
Since using Beauhurst, the company has managed to increase their number of new investments from 1-2 per year to 4-6 deals per year — roughly a 200% increase in investments made — partly thanks to significant time saving and higher quality data insights.
Following our recent expansion into Germany, Chris added: “The companies we’re looking at are increasingly European-based, so it’s exciting that Beauhurst is expanding to Germany.”
With investments in emerging brands, including Tribe, Wildfarmed and Origin Coffee — and Yeo Ventures scaling up its investment portfolio — we can’t wait to see what the future holds for Yeo Ventures.
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