Sandwater

"By creating a single source of truth, Whalesync allows us to stay ahead of the curve compared to our peers and save time, focusing on what really matters."

About Sandwater

Sandwater is a Nordic focused VC fund with EUR 250m in AUM. They focus on Series A-B stage investments with a thematic impact approach within resource conservation, energy transition, human health and wellbeing as well as impact enablers. Since their founding in 2021, Sandwater has funded some of the most ambitious entrepreneurs in Europe including 1x and ClimateView.

The rapidly evolving world of venture capital

As the person responsible for operations and finance at Sandwater, Morten Korsveien leads efforts that keep Sandwater ahead of its peers in finding and funding top deals.

Over the last few years, the VC world has undergone a massive shift with increasing competition and a move toward data-driven investing. In order to maintain access to quality deal flow, funds to invest heavily in smarter, more efficient sourcing operations.

The challenge with CRMs

While CRMs like Affinity and DealCloud give funds a place to store information on prospective deals, they don't provide an efficient way to parse and edit thousands of data points. This leads to tons of wasted effort screening deals that may never have been relevant to the fund.

"So many VCs are caught in a hamster wheel of working up and screening thousands of deals."

As a data-driven firm, Morten knew that Sandwater could operate more efficiently if they could take ownership of their data and structure it themselves.

Unlocking Affinity data with Whalesync

To gain ownership of their data and put an end to CSV importing, Sandwater used Whalesync to set up a two-way sync between Affinity and Airtable. Specifically, they connected thousands of deals, companies, and people across the two systems.

By bringing Affinity into Airtable, Sandwater was able to work with the treasure trove of data previously locked in their CRM, taking advantage of the flexibility of a spreadsheet.

"Whalesync allows us to leverage the best of both Affinity and airtable. For example, we can use formula based inputs in airtable, which simply aren't available in affinity."

Increasing efficiency with a source of truth

By building a source of truth in Airtable using Whalesync's two-way sync, Sandwater has been able to move faster than their peers.

"Whalesync has been a massive efficiency boost. It gives us the ability to manipulate data in a spreadsheet, which is just faster than doing it in a live databases on the cloud"