After graduating from Wharton with his MBA and working in investment banking and at a venture capital fund, Anubhav Srivastava began to notice the struggles associated with fund planning.
In 2021, Srivastava released Tactyc, a platform aimed to help fund managers organize and manage their company’s finances. Tactyc will be presenting at CED’s Venture Connect summit on March 29-30 in RTP.
“Tactyc is the first forecasting and planning software for VCs,” he said. “We basically make it really simple for VCs to plan their fund.”
Srivastava said that Raleigh-based Tactyc works to simplify a process that is typically done in spreadsheets to only a couple of hours, saving its users time.
Within 12 months of having their VC-specific platform, Srivastava said they are already working with more than 200 clients.
Through being a forward-looking company, he said that they are differentiated from other portfolio management software, because while they work to describe where the fund may go in the future, others only focus on the fund’s performance up until the present.
As a B2B SaaS startup, Srivastava said that Tactyc offers a solo tier for smaller funds and teams with funds in the $10M-$20M range, which allows them to buy the platform directly from their website. He said they also have an option for enterprise clients with funds larger than $50M-$100M that includes more services, such as an onboarding training.
Srivastava said there is a lot of user education on Tactyc’s part, especially on model mechanics—such as financial maneuvers and terminology—which may be foreign to a first-time fund manager.
“We’re educating our users while also helping them build their fund model and manage their funds,” he said.
After creating this software, Srivastava said they realized this is something that should have existed the whole time.
“I probably spent more time than is healthy for anyone to spend on Excel spreadsheets and financial models,” he said. “And these were the type of issues we would face at our fund, where just running these complicated scenarios was just incredibly time-consuming, something very difficult and error-prone in spreadsheets.”
With a high demand for their service, Srivastava said they had to work to grow their team as fast as possible to help manage requests. From an engineer and customer success standpoint, though, he said they have not had many growing pains.
Srivastava said that they notice there are a lot of emerging general partners (GPs) of smaller funds, especially those with a focus on diversity initiatives, that do not have the same infrastructure to compete with larger VCs in terms of raising capital.
“We’re empowering them,” he said. “With our platform, we’re actually taking a lot of the best practices at the bigger VCs, we crystallize that into our software so anyone—whether you’re a single solo GP or you’re a first-time manager—you have the same tools at your fingertips.”
Srivastava said democratizing the entire VC GP market is a core mission for Tactyc and that a lot of their clients are emerging fund managers who may at times be overlooked by larger funds.
Within the next four months though, Srivastava said their goal is to consolidate all platforms that VCs use to a singular one, to eliminate the need to enter data multiple times into different software. He also said they hope to capture the entire VC market all the way from early to late stages.
Amanda Powers, Tactyc’s COO, said that another goal is to gain more awareness. She said that they have mainly grown through word of mouth and thought leadership pieces with others in the VC space, but she hopes that this year more people will recognize the service they provide.
“We’re finding that what we have to offer is unique and it’s solving a big pain point for VCs,” she said, “so I think this can be really helpful for everyone.”
Tactyc will be one of many startups presenting at Venture Connect this year, and Powers said they hope to find possible partners and customers to work with.
“I think it’s really to get in front of other venture capital firms to potentially find customers or maybe other service providers in the VC space that could be interesting as partners,” she said.
Srivastava also said they are prepared for the presentation process at Venture Connect, since this is a skill they constantly work on.
“We’re talking to VCs every day,” he said. “I’m doing these sales myself, so when it comes to talking about the product vision for what we want this to be, I think that’s pretty well our road map, so whenever you want us to do that, we’re ready.”