How IVP accelerated investment diligence across 62+ FTEs using Perplexity Enterprise
62+
team members using Perplexity Enterprise
100%
adoption rate across 5+ teams at IVP
2x
increase in investor productivity
IVP turns breakout companies into enduring market leaders. With a 40-year record of supercharging growth and 130+ IPOs, IVP has partnered with over 400 companies like Coinbase, Discord, Dropbox, GitHub, Grammarly, Klarna, Slack, and Twitter. As trusted allies, IVP helps founders and CEOs meet the challenge of leading a rapidly growing company.
The Problem
Streamlining investment diligence and portfolio support with improved search accuracy
Cack Wilhelm, General Partner at IVP, is no stranger to digging through her Google search results for nuanced information on topics like HSR filings and sub-markets within cybersecurity. Her days are spent looking up highly specialized data and exploring new industries and companies for IVP to partner with.
Unfortunately, the nature of her Google searches — which includes diving deep into a potential investment’s market and competitors — means she doesn’t always know precisely what she’s looking for. Google often sends her on a meandering journey before delivering useful results. Then, she has to sift through each link to decide whether the info is useful — or even accurate.
In an attempt to level up from a standard Google Search, Gabby Zhou, Director of Finance at IVP, tried using mainstream AI solutions. However, those tools produced overly broad or vague results from dubious sources, leaving Gabby questioning other platforms’ security while limiting her ability to keep accurate records. Because of this, Gabby went back to using Google. But she kept looking for a better way to address IVP’s two main challenges:
1. Time-consuming knowledge work.
IVP’s diligence, market research, and competitive analysis require serious time and effort, but bandwidth is tight. Cack adds, “I don’t want to navigate the entire Internet—I just want to find the right answer, fast.”
2. Unreliable search results.
With Google Search, IVP’s team couldn’t rely on the results they got or confirm the quality of the sources. “Sometimes, I’d be forced to accept that I just couldn’t find the answer to a question and I’d have to move on,” Cack says.
When IVP discovered Perplexity’s Enterprise offering, it was clear that they had found the direct, work-oriented AI solution they needed. As word spread across the organization, adoption of Perplexity’s free version quickly hit 45% — without any prompting from leadership. So, IVP decided to move forward and roll out Perplexity Enterprise to five of its core teams.
The Solution
Leveraging Perplexity Enterprise to find real-time answers to complex research questions
The remaining 55% of IVP employees quickly began to adopt Perplexity Enterprise as their preferred search platform — across professional and personal accounts. With Perplexity’s AI, they can easily reference their search histories. Most importantly, Perplexity Enterprise seamlessly fits IVP’s workflows. As a result, the team has experienced three core benefits:
Benefit #1: Improved knowledge-seeking for deeper expertise
Cack says Perplexity Enterprise doesn’t just streamline tasks. She says, “It’s better than any other solution for understanding markets and nuance.” That distinction is mission-critical for IVP’s core differentiator: their depth of expertise for supercharged growth. This need for depth has made Perplexity Enterprise their go-to solution for reliable, accessible research.
Reliable search results: Today, IVP’s knowledge-seeking is productive and to the point. Cack calls Perplexity Enterprise an “answer engine” rather than a navigation tool. That’s because everything is cited properly, saving her hours on each search.
Easy search-history retrieval: Every six months, Cack needs essential documents for board meetings. So, she saves them all in a dedicated portfolio in her Perplexity account for easy retrieval. Gabby also archives searches for later reference. They no longer worry about knowledge or important research getting lost.
Secure, in-depth research: Joan Touchstone, IVP’s Head of Communications, often looks up information about active deals and companies the investors are researching. With Perplexity Enterprise, she’s able to search these confidential topics with confidence that her search history won’t be compromised to train the AI’s models.
Competitor fund analysis: Davey Nickels, SVP and Head of Talent, is tasked with finding high-growth talent ideas for IVP and its portfolio companies. With Perplexity Enterprise, he sources growth and employee metrics so he can uncover deep learnings about competitors’ stages, sectors, and investing strategies.
Benefit #2: Streamlined documentation and communication
Perplexity Enterprise has simplified workflows across all five teams at IVP, improving communication and expediting technical writing.
Cross-team communication: When Gabby needs to explain complex numbers and models to non-technical peers, she uses Perplexity’s AI to generate clear explanations of calculations and technical methods. She saves time rewriting technical documents, and her coworkers get the information they need faster.
Quick drafting and summarizing: Amelia Gale, IVP Marketing Associate, uses the AI to draft portfolio company bios, simplify information about IVP’s highly technical infrastructure companies, and even spin up event descriptions. With Perplexity, she’s more productive than ever before without compromising IVP’s expert-level standards.
Email outreach in any tone: When crafting emails to prospects, Gabby can prompt the AI to be friendly or professional, and it easily changes the wording to reflect that. Her favorite part? Perplexity defaults to work-appropriate language.
Benefit #3: Continuous learning and workflow improvements
Most notably, Perplexity has changed the way that IVP learns and evolves. In fact, Cack is one of several team members who use Perplexity Enterprise as their default browser. She says she spends even more time seeking knowledge than before — because she has more time to learn and gain insights into emerging industries and competitive landscapes.
“I gain so much more from the time spent that my reflex now is to introspect a bit further and ask more questions,” she says.
Easy upskilling: Intelligent search ensures that Cack doesn’t have to ask CFOs to explain their pricing methodologies. Instead, the AI explains niche financial acronyms and distills their pros and cons, eliminating hours of internet research (and unnecessary outreach).
Performance management: Janet Nasman, IVP’s Community and Culture Specialist within the HR team, pulls recurring themes from self-evaluations and peer reviews during performance management cycles. Consolidating performance reviews in this way helps her find systemic issues and individual successes, giving her the insights needed to improve company workflows and celebrate wins.
Up-to-date industry knowledge: IVP CMO Blair Shane also uses Perplexity’s search to find the most recent and compelling marketing metrics and gut-check her understanding of specific industries and verticals. This helps her maintain a reputation as a knowledgeable resource on anything and everything related to IVP’s portfolio companies.
The Result
Enhanced productivity and effectiveness across 62+ FTEs
With Perplexity Enterprise in her toolkit, Cack is twice as productive and effective – a drastic improvement. She’s no longer digging for answers amid vague Google Search results. Instead, she asks more questions and gets the answers she needs — in less time than ever before.
Five of IVP’s teams – spanning investment, finance, IT, HR, and marketing — now have a 100% adoption rate of Perplexity, changing the way their team members search while delivering answers significantly faster. Gabby says Perplexity has fundamentally changed her outlook on knowledge work by providing consistent, reliable information. Over time, she knows that the compounding effects of leveraging Perplexity will continue to improve IVP’s productivity.
Cack agrees. In her words, “The activation energy needed for onboarding and learning with Perplexity is so much lower that there’s almost zero barrier to knowledge work.”
