How Northbeam runs a venture fund on Modal

Northbeam is an early-stage fund that invests in fintech companies, writing first cheques of between $500,000 and $2 million. A team of nine, four partners, three associates and two people in platform and operations, reviews around 1,800 companies a year and makes eight to ten new investments.

A fund is a relationship business that most CRMs are not built for. “Sales CRMs think in deals that close and are done,” says Rafael Costa, a partner at Northbeam. “For us, closing is the start. The founder becomes a portfolio company, then a co-investor’s portfolio company, then someone we introduce to other founders. Everything links to everything.”

Three CRMs in four years

Before Modal, Northbeam had used a sales CRM bent into shape, a fund-specific tool and, for one long year, a set of linked spreadsheets. Each failed for a different reason. The sales CRM could not represent a round with several investors. The specialist tool could, but nobody kept it updated because it did not sync email. The spreadsheets were current only for the person who had last opened them.

What the partners wanted was simple to describe: one place where a founder, their company, every round it had raised, everyone who had invested and every intro we had made to them were linked, and kept up to date from the team’s inboxes.

The data model

Northbeam built its workspace over two afternoons with our solutions team. Alongside the standard people and companies objects, it added four custom objects:

• Rounds: each funding round, with stage, size, lead investor, date and status.

• Investments: Northbeam’s own position in a round, with cheque size, ownership and the partner responsible.

• Funds: the fund an investment was made from, so reporting splits cleanly between Fund I and Fund II.

• Intros: who introduced whom, when, and what came of it.

Relationships tie them together. A company has many rounds; a round has many investors, which are companies too; an investment belongs to one round and one fund. Because relationships in Modal read from both ends, a co-investor’s company record lists every round Northbeam has shared with them without anyone maintaining that list.

Deal flow as a pipeline

New companies arrive from the website form, from partners’ inboxes and from intros. They go into a pipeline with five stages: Sourced, First meeting, Partner meeting, Diligence and Term sheet. Passed companies are kept, tagged with a reason, because founders who were too early often come back 18 months later.

The associates rely on two features above all. Relationship strength shows which partner knows a founder or their investors best, so a cold inbound can often be turned into a warm conversation. AI fields fill in each company’s last round, headcount trend and main competitors from public sources, which used to take an associate 20 minutes per company.

Intros, tracked

The Intros object is the part Rafael is proudest of. Every time a partner introduces a founder to a customer, hire or investor, the intro is logged with both sides and an outcome. Northbeam now knows which of its own contacts lead to first meetings, and which intros its founders asked for and never got.

That data changed how the fund sources. Partners now ask the people behind their most successful intros for referrals directly. In the first two quarters on Modal, first meetings that came from a warm intro doubled, from about 30 to about 60 a quarter.

LP updates in an afternoon

Quarterly letters to limited partners used to take the operations team most of a week, gathering figures from founders by email and cross-checking them with the spreadsheet. Portfolio companies now report key metrics through a shared form that writes straight to their company records, and the LP report is a Modal dashboard filtered by fund.

“The letter still takes thought,” Rafael says. “But the numbers take an afternoon instead of five days, and I trust them.”

What other funds can take from it

If you run a fund and are setting up Modal, Northbeam’s advice is to start with rounds and intros rather than trying to model everything. Those two objects carry most of the value. Add the rest once the team is using it every day.