How did the story of Zapflow begin?

It all started when I ran the M&A and equity investments of a firm with 80+ transactions under its belt and so many evaluated investment opportunities. I felt all the pains personally and wanted to, not only solve my own problems, but also those of other professional investors working on their deal flow: insane amounts of data, too many things to do and, to put it nicely, less than perfect tools to manage deal flow.

Any professional investor (VC, PE, CVC, M&A) typically claims to invest in or acquire 1 in x00 companies they evaluate. Over time, such deal flow leads to tens of thousands of emails, hundreds of business plans, countless internal status-check calls/emails/chats/discussions and never-ending ordeal of putting together deal flow stats & reports for internal (e.g. team, partners, boss) and external (e.g. LPs) stakeholders. Further managing the data collected during evaluation and transaction process can be a major pain in the butt let alone collecting financial and other KPI data from target companies and later portfolio companies.

I had all such data scattered in multiple inboxes, Excel spreadsheets, Trello boards, Slack channels, Word-documents, internal reports and weekly meeting memos – and putting together any meaningful information for it was just too much. I never wanted to stress again about the questions: “How’s our pipeline?”, “What’s going on with XYZ” or “Didn’t you already look into Starco?”. I needed a solution to make all that pain go away.

I wanted to have a solution that is able to support me on my workload, keeps track of the deals over time, looks nice and modern and which would enable me to enter the deals to my deal flow from my e-mail and collaborate with my colleagues as well. I had had it – things had to change. I wanted to have the solution I wanted to use myself.