How Bessemer Venture Partners transformed investment, finance, investor relations, and legal workflows—saving hundreds of hours with Perplexity Enterprise
400+
portfolio companies tracked with Perplexity
90%
immediate adoption rate
50%
reduction in time spent on manual research
Bessemer Venture Partners is a leading venture investment firm managing hundreds of active private and public investments across industries. With a global footprint and a culture of compliance and innovation, the firm accelerates better investment decisions and collaborative workflows for all stakeholders.
The Problem
An evolving-tech stack slowing down teams and draining hours collecting information
Bessemer Venture Partners operates in a fast-paced world, managing hundreds of portfolio companies across a dynamic investment landscape. However, their technology stack—accumulated over years of business—was becoming increasingly difficult to extract insights from, quickly. Teams were constantly racing against the clock with complex Excel VBA workflows, fragmented research processes, and manual document processing.
“Manually searching for company data, prepping summaries, tracking 75-100 companies for LP meetings—it was a huge time sink,” shared Augie Wilkinson, Bessemer’s Director of Portfolio Monitoring & Analysis, “Even small day-to-day tasks, from composing emails to wrangling spreadsheet data, chipped away at our focus.”
With hundreds of portfolio companies, various data subscriptions, reliance on legacy email digests for information sharing, and countless hours entering data across multiple storage systems, it was getting hard to piece together insights across the fragmented data sets to make confident investment decisions, faster.
“Legal reviews, for example, were especially slow. Reviewing each NDA could take one to two hours,” recalled Augie “Summarizing lengthy documents was no quicker.”
The fragmented tech stack, inefficient data access, and manual processes were draining hours and preventing teams from gaining critical context. Bessemer needed a solution to streamline workflows, centralize data access, and enable faster, more informed decision-making.
The Solution
A secure, unified answer engine empowering every team at Bessemer Venture Partners
Bessemer chose Perplexity Enterprise to transform their research, investment, and legal workflows—without sacrificing security and abandoning their existing file storage systems.
Custom workflows now allow Bessemer’s investment teams to:
Automate legacy Excel and data analysis, bypassing hours of manual macro troubleshooting
Instantly collect and synthesize intel on over 400 portfolio companies, replacing outdated research systems and accelerating team-wide information sharing with answers that are always citing appropriate web and internal file sources
Legal teams quickly summarize contracts and extract key insights—reducing review timelines from hours to minutes—while maintaining strict compliance.
Meanwhile, investor relations teams leverage Perplexity's answer engine to draft content and presentations faster, supporting both LP communications and internal events.
“The ability to get source-cited results means we can move quickly without losing precision or accuracy. Team members agreed,” says Anita Umarji, Partner, Head of Investor Relations.
The Result
Modernized research, accelerated operations, and real-time insights to make decisions faster without sacrificing accuracy
With Perplexity Enterprise, Bessemer Venture Partners has slashed manual effort, boosted adoption, and empowered every staff member—beyond their main investment teams. Teams now:
Cut 50% or more from manual research, document processing, and repetitive spreadsheet tasks
Effectively monitor hundreds of portfolio companies for LP meetings and reporting—with confidence in their data
Summarize contracts and legal documents in minutes, freeing legal and compliance teams to focus on growth
Enable seamless, source-cited information gathering for investment, finance, and legal teams—supporting smarter, faster decisions
“It helps me draft the outlines for presentations, so I get to a solid framework much faster," Anita says. "It feels like cheating, but it gives me an edge and saves a lot of time.”
Most importantly, Bessemer wanted to implement a solution that could support its team while maintaining security.
Augie says they have found just that: “having a closed system that doesn't train on our data was critical. Moving to a Perplexity Enterprise Plan was essential for that, especially implementing SSO and SCIM for easier security management. It provides comfort to different teams with varying confidentiality levels—Perplexity is able to isolate sensitive files that are not accessible across all teams.”
