Felicis

Founded in 2006, Felicis is a venture capital firm that invests in companies reinventing core markets or creating frontier technologies. Felicis focuses on early-stage investments and manages over $3B in capital across nine funds. The firm is an early backer of over 45 companies valued at $1B+; over 100 of its portfolio companies, including Shopify, Adyen, Credit Karma, and Recursion, have been acquired or gone public. The firm has also invested in Notion, Canva, Flexport, Runway, Vannevar Labs, and Weights & Biases.

Felicis was the first to offer a Founder Development pledge, providing needed resources to help founders grow personally and professionally. The firm partners with LPs representing organizations making a positive impact on the world, including foundations, hospitals, university endowments, and philanthropic family offices.

Katie Riester, Managing Director & General Partner of Fund of Funds Investing, knew Felicis needed an investor portal that appropriately reflected the firm’s brand. “Investor relations is about customer service. We aim to delight our LPs with streamlined support and easy communication,” she noted. However, with their legacy platform, LPs had to navigate a confusing, outdated user interface and could not access documentation on demand. Meanwhile, manually checking PDFs for missing information, such as contact lists and wire instructions, and chasing that information down meant it could take the Felicis team days to onboard each new investor properly. Katie and her team wanted to ensure LPs would receive critical emails, notices, and financial information easily and securely, as well as scale the internal processes.

“We also like to keep the fundraising process as short as possible so the team can focus on investing,” said Katie, for whom closing a fund sometimes feels like “being the only person in the control tower at JFK trying to land dozens of planes at once. You have to keep them all safe and get everyone landed simultaneously.” With outdated, disparate systems, Felicis had LP data sitting across multiple tools, email inboxes, and Excel files. “The finance team had to type everything in. It is the very definition of a manual, no value-add task,” pointed out Katie. “And it was challenging to keep up with the pace of onboarding new LPs because of it.”

As Katie noted, “Our number one value is learning and adapting rapidly. We are constantly trying to get better at everything we do.” This is one of the driving pillars of the firm’s investing thesis and a reason for its long-term success. When Felicis applied that same philosophy to its own operations, the firm realized it needed a modern investor portal that delivered a best-in-class investor experience from start to finish—providing LPs with a centralized location to easily access investment data, securely and digitally update wire instructions, and manage contact access. A universal system would also mean Felicis could allow investors to log in and see all their investments with Felicis in one view.

Felicis needed a more transparent platform to easily track subscription documents and automatically import investor data to simplify the investor onboarding process. The team also wanted to run reports and audit trails to review the data in the portal and track LP contact changes to ensure accuracy.

When choosing a new partner, Katie and her colleagues found that many providers offered more of the same. “The competition was not aesthetically pleasing. They were cluttered. Meanwhile, Juniper Square has a clean UI and is easy to navigate on both GP and LP sides.” The Juniper Square service team's responsiveness and expertise also made it an easy choice. “When I am out there trying to raise hundreds of millions of dollars, I need a partner that will jump on the phone and support me during the most crucial part of my job—closing that fund.”

Juniper Square’s platform has made it easy for Katie and her colleagues to track LP progress as they worked through subscription documents. It also helped ease the administrative work on the operations side as critical data, such as contact lists and wire instructions, would be automatically added throughout the onboarding process and pulled into their portal once fundraising was completed. The system’s workflows “removed steps from the equation and allowed us to complete the review process in a matter of hours.”

While Katie worried that some LPs would be hesitant about switching to a new system, investors weren’t. A few told Katie their information was already in another portal managed by Juniper Square, which meant they could use their existing login information to access their Felicis investment details.

The portal’s value didn’t stop when the fund closed. “Instead of taking the finance team a full day to upload quarterly reports and review the data before releasing it to LPs, Juniper Square made it so that the entire process would take a couple of hours at most,” said Katie.