Powering new research and reporting through the automation of information gathering

Raffaele Nolli is an Analyst working at Extend Ventures. We spoke to Raffaele about the new research and work that Eigen has enabled Extend Ventures to perform.

The challenge

For Extend Ventures to achieve their goal of helping diverse entrepreneurs become more successful, the organization wanted to explore publicly available documents, such as financial and capital statements and use the information to power new research. The research would be used to form a report into the performance of companies founded by black and ethnic entrepreneurs as a follow-up to their 2020 Diversity Beyond Gender Report.

In the past, Extend Ventures could only use data that was publicly and commercially available to conduct research projects. The organization required a more technical solution to extend their scope of analysis and dive more into the performance and financial metrics of start-up companies.

The solution

Extend Ventures was provided with a solution by Eigen that enabled documents to be read more quickly and efficiently and gave them the ability to pull specific data from these documents so they could conduct new forms of research.

The Eigen platform enabled Extend Ventures to train and deploy machine learning models that delivered the data necessary to broaden the scope of their research and automate data compilation to a standard they were happy with. Positive feedback was received on the ease of the onboarding process and the responsiveness of the Eigen team when their help was required.

Once set up with the Eigen platform, Extend Ventures was able to process thousands of documents and extract multiple data points from accounts, financial statements, capital statements, digital PDFs and scanned documents. The data was then quickly downloaded into Excel and reviewed by their researchers.

The results

Extend Ventures was able to automate the data extraction process for their new research projects using the Eigen platform to complete tasks ahead of schedule with reliable and consistent results. Over the course of the project, 30,000 documents were analyzed with an 80% accuracy rate achieved.

The capabilities that Eigen provides to Extend Ventures enables them to extract deeper insights into the performance of companies led by people from ethnic backgrounds and bring attention to missed investment opportunities that result from the exclusion of diverse UK founders with more substantial evidence.

Extend Ventures is now in the process of evaluating other research projects that the Eigen platform can help them to expedite and complete.

About Extend Ventures

Extend Ventures is a not-for-profit organisation with the goal of helping diverse entrepreneurs turn their ideas and visions into successful companies. Extend Ventures has a dedicated team who turn ideas into profitable businesses to impact their industry and beyond.