How IVP accelerated investment
diligence across 62+ FTEs using
Perplexity Enterprise Pro
How IVP accelerated investment
diligence across 62+ FTEs using
Perplexity Enterprise Pro
62+ FTEs
62+ FTEs
team members using Perplexity Enterprise Pro
team members using Perplexity Enterprise Pro
100% adoption
adoption rate across
5+ teams at IVP
adoption rate across
5+ teams at IVP
2x increase
increase in investor
productivity
increase in investor
productivity
How IVP accelerated investment
diligence across 62+ FTEs using
Perplexity Enterprise Pro
62+ FTEs
team members using Perplexity Enterprise Pro
100% adoption
adoption rate across
5+ teams at IVP
2x increase
increase in investor
productivity
CUSTOMER TESTIMONIAL
“Perplexity Enterprise Pro helps the entire team at IVP accelerate investor productivity and our ability to rapidly evaluate new market segments. As a result, our diligence is significantly faster.”
“Perplexity Enterprise Pro helps the entire team at IVP accelerate investor productivity and our ability to rapidly evaluate new market segments. As a result, our diligence is significantly faster.”
“Perplexity Enterprise Pro helps the entire team at IVP accelerate investor productivity and our ability to rapidly evaluate new market segments. As a result, our diligence is significantly faster.”
Cack Wilhelm, General Partner at IVP
Cack Wilhelm, General Partner at IVP
Cack Wilhelm, General Partner at IVP
The Problem
The Problem
Streamlining investment diligence and portfolio support with improved search accuracy
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 Pro 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 Pro to five of its core teams.
The Cleveland Cavaliers were ready to use AI to bring the future of work to their organization, allowing Team Members to take the initiative to find answers to critical questions faster.
“We knew automation wouldn’t solve every use case,” says Ben Levicki, the Cavaliers’ AI Solutions Architect, “But we also knew that AI could increase efficiency and productivity, boost skill enhancement with instant insights and empower employee growth.”
The Cavs’ previous internal solution, an AI chatbot, was secure and private but required ongoing development efforts that slowed implementation. As a one-person AI team, Ben hoped to eliminate this patched-together solution and advance to a comprehensive AI search engine witha “succinct UI that pulls in documents, images and video assets.” His list of must-haves included:
Flexibility: The Cavs needed a solution that aligned with its wide-ranging use cases — everything from researching partnerships to closing knowledge gaps for its data team.
Security: With zero-party data as one of their competitive advantages, the Cavs required a tool that didn’t train its AI models on their proprietary internal data sets.
Accuracy: Reliability was also a concern. Most tools are prone to hallucinations (i.e., incorrect or misleading results). To get buy-in from the entire team, Ben needed a model that was known for generating accurate and verified information sources.
In other words, Ben wanted a solution that could leverage AI’s full capabilities and boost the organization’s productivity.
The Solution
The Solution
Leveraging Perplexity Enterprise Pro to find real-time answers to complex research questions
Leveraging Perplexity Enterprise Pro to find real-time answers to complex research questions
The remaining 55% of IVP employees quickly began to adopt Perplexity Enterprise Pro 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 Pro 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 Pro 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 Pro 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 Pro 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 Pro, 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 Pro, 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 Pro 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 Pro 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.
Given the flexibility, security, and accuracy needs of the Cavs, Perplexity Enterprise Pro became the Cavs’ number-one pick. Once Ben started using Perplexity, he saw that onboarding fellow organizational teams would be technologically easy. The challenge in every organization with a new process is getting buy-in. To ensure Team Members understood the full benefits of Perplexity Enterprise Pro, Ben met with each team to explain how the tool could improve their daily performance and efficiency. One perfect example is that he showed the IT team how to simplify explanations of technical topics for non-technical stakeholders, saving time and increasing the ease of novice understanding using Perplexity.
The use case that most attracted teams to Perplexity was far simpler. They witnessed firsthand how Perplexity’s advanced web search empowers everyone in the Cavs organization to take research into their own hands. As Ben affirms, “Perplexity Out-Googles Google.”
Perplexity’s AI search engine sifts through clutter and closes knowledge gaps. “That’s where all of the magic begins,” Ben says. “Perplexity augments repetitive, mundane tasks, so team members can focus on human skills like critical thinking, problem-solving and empathy.” In other words, the team spends less time searching and more time on deep work. The advantages that Perplexity offers in search also include that it:
Enables Mixed-Media Searches: The ability to add documents and images to searches allows anyone in the organization to get results tailored to their needs. For example, the development team can drop a graph about ticket sales into Perplexity, and the AI summarizes the document’s emerging trends in one click — without sacrificing data privacy (unlike other AI tools, Perplexity never retains critical customer data).
Lowers the Learning Curve: Perplexity is LLM agnostic, so AI beginners and experienced users alike get immediate value from the tool — whether they need an in-depth detailed response or natural-sounding answers.
Saves Valuable Time: Rather than drafting separate knowledge-based documentation for each of the Cavaliers’ departments, Team Members can attach relevant documents to a Perplexity search. The tool then easily parses meaning from this context and provides quick answers. With this functionality, Perplexity streamlines prospecting for the partnerships team by writing bespoke outreach emails in a flash.
Consolidates In-Depth Learnings: Perplexity also makes it easy for the Cavs to analyze long, complex documents, saving months of research. For example, the sustainability team used Perplexity to analyze long environmental studies in the Cleveland area to reveal how climate change may impact their stadium operations. These findings enabled the organization to approach events with sustainability in mind.
With Perplexity, the organization conducts deep research and finds relevant information far faster than before – driving efficiency gains and saving valuable time across teams.
The Result
The Result
Enhanced productivity and effectiveness across 62+ FTEs
Enhanced productivity and effectiveness across 62+ FTEs
Enhanced productivity and effectiveness across 62+ FTEs
With Perplexity Enterprise Pro 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.”
Perplexity Enterprise Pro has been a huge time-saver for the entire Cavaliers organization. For the partnerships team, email outreach (spanning partner identification, strategy and drafting) used to take up to two hours. Now, this task takes only a few minutes from end-to-end. What’s more, Ben himself saves up to 20 hours per week using Perplexity. He says the tool handles all his repetitive tasks from end-to-end. For instance, when Ben needs information for a presentation, Perplexity swiftly summarizes documents on his behalf. “This makes gathering information nearly effortless,” he says. With these knowledge gaps closed, Ben has been hard at work ramping up the Cavaliers’ AI architecture. Ben calls Perplexity the “best, most secure tool of its kind. It’s proved that it can keep our information safe while augmenting and enriching roles across our organization.”
Best of all, the Cavaliers continue to find innovative use cases to boost efficiency and increase Team Member autonomy with Perplexity. Ben envisions adding the tool to new hire orientation next. This way, new Team Members can ramp up faster and provide value to the organization sooner.
Company name
IVP
About the company
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.