The ninety-minute first pass on each inbound deck runs overnight: founders and their histories, the market, who else is in it, funding to date, and the questions worth asking on the intro call.
Three decks arrived over the weekend and the partner meeting is at nine. Monday starts with three structured briefs instead of three PDFs, because the ninety-minute first pass on each one ran overnight.
The old choice was skim all three or do one properly. A companion reads many pages at once while signed into the data sources your fund already pays for, so the volume of inbound stops setting the depth of your screen.
01
How do you systematize the first pass?
You write the brief format once and a companion assembles it the same way every time: founders and their histories, the market and who else is in it, funding to date, customer evidence, and the two or three questions worth asking on the intro call. It also tells you what it could not verify.
EQT’s investment team uses Strawberry to extract structured data from websites, automate deep research and gather intelligence at diligence depth, reporting 70% of research time saved and faster evaluations. The EQT case study is short and worth the read.
The same extraction pass builds market maps: every company in a category with the fields you care about, as rows rather than bookmarks. The underlying motion is the data extraction workflow pointed at deal work.
03
Pipeline and portfolio, kept warm
Deal flow decays out of sight. The company you passed on raises, the founder you liked leaves, and nobody notices for a quarter. Routines watch for exactly this: scheduled scans of portfolio-company news and hiring, pipeline records updated in tools like Affinity, and a Monday brief of what changed across every list you care about.
Because companions work in your logged-in session, the notes land where your firm already looks.
It does the research layer: founder backgrounds, market and competitor mapping, funding history and customer evidence, structured into a brief with a source on every claim and an explicit list of what it could not verify. Reference calls and legal diligence stay with the deal team, arriving already briefed.
An overnight first pass on inbound, one consistent screening brief per company, then scheduled market maps and pipeline hygiene on top. The research playbook walks through the setup.
Yes. Companions work inside your logged-in session, so they update the pipeline tools your firm already uses, including Affinity, and can flag changes for confirmation before committing them.
Routines run scheduled scans across your portfolio list, covering news, hiring, product changes and competitor moves, and deliver a digest on the cadence you set.
Strawberry is local-first: chats, passwords and browsing data stay on your device, and consequential actions wait for your approval. The model is documented in the security white paper.