| CUSTOMER STORY
How Comitis Capital Optimizes their Deal Origination Workflow
The Challenge:
The need for technology to drive efficiency for a lean team.
Use Cases:
Market analysis
Research using browser extension
The Results:
Faster, more streamlined deal origination, better visibility into niche sectors, increased efficiency, and a competitive edge with their small team.
Founded in 2021, Comitis Capital is a purpose-driven private equity firm headquartered in Frankfurt, Germany with an investment focus on Western Europe. They specialize in majority partnerships with founders and management teams, but also have flexibility to take (significant) minority positions, with a sweet spot of €30-50 million equity per investment.
Comitis Capital takes a customized approach to each partnership that aims to accelerate profitable revenue growth and create impactful businesses. By offering entrepreneurs and business leaders strategic guidance, organizational excellence and access to a broad network of experts, they drive long-term value creation for all their portfolio companies.
The Need for a Digital Solution
With a very lean setup, Comitis Capital recognized the need to be as efficient and effective as possible in their workflows to keep pace with their larger peers. To do so, they turned to technology.
When building their tech stack, they sought out a digital solution that would streamline their proprietary deal sourcing workflow, helping them to quickly identify, analyze and engage with relevant companies.
While Comitis Capital used other data platforms, they found the data lacking in quality and the platforms themselves difficult and slow to navigate, meaning their deal sourcing process still required a significant amount of time and manual work.
The Solution:
Choosing Gain as their Private Market Intelligence Platform
After evaluating other platforms, Comitis Capital decided on Gain as their go-to private market intelligence platform. What stood out to them the most was its ease of use and superior data quality. They were also impressed by its advanced functionalities that would allow them to quickly identify investment opportunities in niche sectors.
Use Cases:
Proprietary Deal Sourcing on Gain
One of the primary ways Comitis Capital leverages Gain is for proprietary deal sourcing, using the platform’s granular filter system to hone in on investment opportunities within their sweet spot. They do this by inputting specific keywords and filter criteria like financials, ownership type and geography into the platform to generate a list of highly relevant companies.
What differentiates Gain’s deal sourcing capabilities from other platforms is its intuitive interface that not only allows you to search using a highly specific set of criteria, but to conduct semantic searches.
The team at Comitis Capital also finds Gain’s Similar Companies feature valuable in finding relevant companies. This functionality uses artificial intelligence to generate a list of complementary businesses based on tags.
This ease of use, combined with Gain’s smart filter system, has helped streamline Comitis Capital’s internal deal sourcing process.
Discovering and Understanding Niche Industries
Comitis Capital also leverages Gain to quickly get up to speed on niche industries, including those that may not have previously been on their radar. The platform’s comprehensive industry reports provide information and insights on:
Specific segments
Market outlook
ESG ratings
Analyst assessments
Active investors and advisors
And more
These reports are also packed with proprietary insights curated through C-level interviews, providing a wealth of information that helps the team gain an inside perspective on industries.
For Comitis Capital, these reports are also a valuable starting point for identifying potential investment opportunities within a sector. By filtering the list of companies within the industry, they can easily discover new targets that align with their investment criteria.
Once identified, the team can save their search criteria as a Bookmark so they can track the companies and receive updates when new companies are added to the list or when financials are updated. These Bookmarks allow Comitis Capital to take a proactive approach to their deal sourcing.
Researching with the Browser Extension
When browsing the web, Comitis Capital makes the most out of Gain’s browser extension to quickly gain a view of a company without leaving its webpage. The extension allows them to easily access key company information directly from Gain without having to switch between tabs. This streamlined workflow has significantly enhanced their efficiency when reviewing potential opportunities.
With the Gain browser extension, the team can instantly access detailed company information and data, including:
Concise business description
Cleaned financials
Analyst assessments
Ownership information
And more
Directly from the browser extension, they can save the company profile on Gain for further research later on.
The results:
Benefits of Leveraging Gain
Since adopting Gain, Comitis Capital has experienced substantial efficiency gains. Most notably, their proprietary deal sourcing process has become faster and more streamlined, allowing them to identify relevant investment opportunities with greater ease. The team is also able to get up to speed on niche industries more efficiently with the platform's deep dive reports.
Additionally, Gain has empowered the team to engage in meaningful conversations with companies. “Even as a small team, we can move faster, avoid hierarchies and still maintain the knowledge and speed of a bigger firm, while benefiting from the fast decision-making of a smaller team.” - Felix Jauch
Overall, Gain has given Comitis Capital a competitive edge by enabling them to be efficient in their operation while also playing to their own strengths, like agility and flexibility.
The Role of Technology in Private Equity
As technology plays an increasingly important role in shaping the future of private equity, it enables firms to enhance efficiency and focus on the elements that differentiate themselves in a competitive landscape. At Comitis Capital, digital platforms like Gain have already made a profound impact.
By building a strong tech stack early in their journey, Comitis Capital is positioning themselves for long-term success. They are not only increasing efficiency but also future-proofing their operations to stay competitive as digital solutions evolve.
