by Clément Aglietta

Imagine how difficult it was for an empire to keep track of the birth rate, the size of harvests or the spoils from a conquest, with no writing system. In this era, certain people were thus given the task of memorizing the empire’s data. If such a person died, a whole swathe of the economic history of the kingdom disappeared. That is why, 5000 years ago, on the banks of the Euphrates, someone invented a simple and efficient way of transmitting data. The man who signed his name to the earliest written record was Kushim, and his job was to keep the accounts in the kingdom of Sumer in Mesopotamia. Our ambition today is nothing less than to offer clients a management tool that is just as indispensable as Kushim’s in their decision-making and data exchange..

What is Kushim?

Kushim is the first cloud-based portfolio management tool designed specifically for venture capital investors.

Our principal features are:

• Classification and storage of investment data in a secure manner
• A news service that provides real-time access to all latest news about your portfolio companies
• Storage of all legal documents (convertible notes, SAFEs, Cap Tables) on a dedicated page for each startup
• Reporting tools that analyze performance of each of your funds (and all funds or select funds in aggregate)
• Tools that allow portfolio companies to communicate with and provide information to their investors
• Ability to manage several financial vehicles / funds on the same platform
• More than 60 metrics to monitor the evolution of your portfolio companies
• Ability to import and restructure financial data from any format (for free)
• Unlimited number of users

And much more to come…

Kushim allows clients to store and organise all the data from an investment fund through a trustworthy and foolproof method. Once all the data is hosted, then described, it is very easy to extract the statistics and view the totality of a portfolio.

The Story

Everything started in 2013 when I met Fabrice Grinda at Le Web in Paris. After talking at length, he offered me the opportunity to intern at his portfolio company Rebagg.

After proving myself during the internship, Fabrice heard about how I had done and asked me to help him to manage his investments. For more than a year, we spent time developing better ways to keep records, create reports and gain insights from our data. We wanted a clean way to see how portfolio companies were growing, what the real-time portfolio value was, how the cap tables of portfolio companies evolved over time, etc. The trouble was, we couldn’t find a solution that met all of our needs. So, as any entrepreneur would, we decided to build it!

We started by first creating a young and amazing team that had both financial and technologic vision. Not only has the founding team of Kushim has worked in venture capital funds, private equity funds and institutional banks, but they all also went to school for design and technology.

Step 1 create a fantastic team !

We staffed an amazing and young team with both financial and technologic vision. The founding team of Kushim has worked in VC funds, Private Equity firm and institutional banks. But they all from design and technology School.

• Nicolas, our CTO, created his first company at 18 years old. He is passionate about Finance graduated from the best French internet and technology school
• Josselin, our designer, has worked as a Product Manager with Alliance Entreprendre and Natixis Bank Groupe, and is a graduate from one of the best European design schools
• Alexandre, our COO, worked with BPI (a large European investment bank) as an Analyst and with Eurazeo (a $5 billion private equity firm), and also graduated from one of the best European design schools
• Victor, our tech team manager, worked as a consultant with Alliance Entreprendre Private Equity and graduated from the best French technology school

We also have an additional team of five developers who are working tirelessly to push the limits of what we can do with Kushim.

Why we a created Kushim ?

We love VCs because they give the power to young entrepreneurs to create, innovate, and change the world in better way. Beyond just providing capital, the great value of venture investors is their capacity to take risks and the power they have to help young companies achieve something great.

Our goal is to help them to have the best overview of what they are doing so that they can spend less time on daily administrative tasks and instead focus their mind on what is really important

This is how we do it

VCs invest in the most innovative and creative companies, yet the software they are using looks old and grey. It isn’t intuitive or easy to use, has the wrong features and is insanely expensive. We decided to change that by working very closely with VC’s to understand what their objectives are, and then translating that into features. Our software is evolving every day and getting better. Our long term goal is to improve every aspect of the investment process from deal flow generation to wire. We won’t stop until we can provide the best experience possible!