As long-time angel investors and co-directors of Launchpad Venture Group, we learned that to achieve returns in early stage investing, you have to pay attention to the details: track company progress, understand which companies and industries have the highest growth potential, analyze key performance metrics, and monitor upcoming events like warrant expirations and escrow payouts.

Diversification into a large number of companies is key to success as an angel investor, so you quickly outgrow basic tools like spreadsheets, email folders and paper files. As your portfolio grows and the number and complexity of rounds expands, all those emails, signature pages, documents and investor reports start to pile up and go ignored, and the problem only snowballs with follow-ons, note conversions, warrants, and tax deadlines. You work too hard for your returns to accept losses due to inadequate record-keeping.  By 2012, with a large and growing portfolio we were feeling this pain acutely, and we saw it was happening to our peers as well.

Having spent most of our careers in the software industry, we launched our own startup and set out to build a powerful portfolio solution to address the challenges of managing and valuing early stage investments. Today we use Seraf to track the Launchpad group portfolio, as well as our personal portfolios and all three of the funds we operate. Thousands of angels, VCs, funds, family offices, accelerators and angel groups around the world have joined us, making Seraf the leader in early stage portfolio management.

And because we are passionate about investing in startups, in the fall of 2014 we launched The Seraf Compass to provide early stage investor education and share learning, experiences and insights with the community. The Compass is an industry-leading collection of free tools, articles, eBooks and videos, organized into advanced courses & topics, and has been awarded one of the best angel investing blogs by BPlans and Personal Income.

Welcome to Seraf. We love it, our colleagues and customers love it, and we hope you will too.