Anushka Pandey

Foliosure is a portfolio management product enabling private market investors make more informed decisions by offering real-time insights through a distilled view of portfolio performance.
Private equity firms spend significant effort defending valuations to LPs.

Stakeholders believed valuation automation could reduce effort, improve trust, and strengthen product positioning.

oliosure is a portfolio management product enabling private market investors make more informed decisions by offering real-time insights through a distilled view of portfolio performance.
Private equity firms spend significant effort defending valuations to LPs.

Stakeholders believed valuation automation could reduce effort, improve trust, and strengthen product positioning.

Quick summary

Challenge

Can valuation actually be automated?

Question

Stakeholders proposed valuation automation as a strategic investment.

Before committing engineering resources, we needed to determine whether automation solved the underlying problem or simply addressed a symptom.

Hypothesis

If valuation workflows were automated:

Time spent on reconciliation would decrease
LP confidence would increase
Product differentiation would improve

"Spending hours justifying company

valuation to clients affects our billables"

"Spending hours justifying company

valuation to clients affects our billables"

Research Objective & Approach

Objectives

Validate whether valuation automation solves a meaningful problem
Understand how valuation decisions are made in practice
Identify where software can create the most value

Approach
Industry Research -> Competitive Analysis -> Stakeholder Interviews -> Workflow Shadowing

5 Competitors, 11 Parameters

6 Stakeholders, 3 BUs

5 Shadowing Sessions

Research Findings

Context

Valuation Methodologies are highly contextual and differs for each portfolio company

Help users understand value

Time

Data reconciliation dominates effort. 80% of meeting time is spent validating inputs.

Reasoning

LP scrutiny focuses on assumptions and judgement.

Not calculations.

Core Insight

Valuation automation was never the real problem. It was a proxy for - Trust, Risk Visibility & Perceived Sophistication for stakeholders

Concept Exploration

Solution 01 : Focus on comparable valuation methodology
Aligning technical feasibility, market standards & client asks

Solution 02 : Human-in-the-loop valuation support.
Reduce reconciliation effort while preserving analyst judgement.
Values in table prepopulate but analyst has the affordance to edit & audit it.

Validation Result & Business Impact

Concept evaluations revealed low confidence in fully automated valuation workflows.

Stakeholders preferred decision-support systems over automated decision-making.

Private equity firms were using Foliosure to track their portfolio performance. Foliosure's driving force is a cohort of financial analysts who manually format data into a proprietary excel template before uploading it on the tool.
This data then gets consumed through metrics, charts, logs or downloaded as customised reports.

$100K+ avoided

In misaligned engineering & product investment

No Automation

Validated a shift from full automation to human in loop intelligence