“We had this Notion dashboard, and we had all these files on it, and we had just this big database that was way too big for anyone to look through in a reasonable amount of time.”
How This Venture Fund Turned a Notion Monster Into LP-Ready Insights
Portfolio reporting that once demanded hours of hunting and emails, now poised to scale with HeronAI. Bold Ventures runs a diverse portfolio.
HeronAI consolidates many systems into a single, adaptable layer so the fund can trade admin hours for strategic time with LPs and founders.
The challenge: one fund, dozens of different stacks
Bold Ventures is a venture fund that backs sustainability-minded, diverse founders and cares about founder well-being and work–life balance. As the portfolio expanded, so did the data problem: each company shipped reports in a different format, used different tools, and conformed to different regulatory needs. The team’s Notion dashboard, a single large database of files and tables, became a practical dead end: nobody could read it end-to-end, and monitoring the portfolio became a weekly slog.
Casey Waterman, an intern at the fund, put the operational burden bluntly,
“roughly five to ten hours a week is spent just checking in and keeping tabs on these companies in a way that a venture fund is supposed to.”
The approach: a flexible, portfolio-level layer, not another forced standard
Bold Ventures didn’t want to force each founder and finance team to change their tools or workflows. Instead, they chose a different design trade: add a central, flexible layer that adapts to each company’s stack. HeronAI integrates with Google Sheets, QuickBooks, and hundreds of other tools, pulling disparate feeds into one portfolio hub without asking companies to adopt a single system.
“Our biggest value is that it's able to integrate with multiple systems at the same time.”
That adaptability matters because onboarding new portfolio companies doesn’t mean rebuilding dashboards or retraining teams. HeronAI’s integration-first approach lets the fund keep the data where it lives and surface the insights where people work, saving time and keeping founders focused on product and people, not admin. Casey puts it plainly,
“It can integrate with all of those softwares and sort of pull that together into one central location.”
Every tool connected, one trusted source for decisions.
The LP payoff: fewer menial cycles, more strategic bandwidth
Bold Ventures’ quarterly reporting routine used to trigger a flurry of emails and manual reconciliations. As Casey notes,
“around the end of the quarter, there's this whole stream of emails between us and our portfolio companies.”
With HeronAI, much of that friction drops away: periodic checks become automated, the signal-to-noise ratio improves, and the team can redirect energy toward LP conversations, sourcing, and supporting founders.
“It just frees up time from some of the menial stuff so we can focus on more important things, like conversations with our LPs and talking to new portfolio companies and making sure our current portfolio has what they need.”
Although the rollout is still underway, Casey describes the platform as “significantly faster” on early tests and highlights the fund’s confidence in HeronAI’s responsiveness.
“They've been incredibly diligent and there to help us with anything we might need. I can email a team member and have a response within five minutes, 90% of the time.”
What Bold Ventures is seeing so far
Early usage points to clear operational compression: the team anticipates cutting the roughly five-to-ten-hours-per-week monitoring burden, especially at quarter-end, as routine checks become automated. Onboarding has become faster because HeronAI adapts to existing systems rather than forcing migrations, which reduces friction for new portfolio companies. LP reporting is already cleaner: consolidated feeds and normalized data make it easier to produce LP-ready summaries and reduce round-trip email. And because vendor support is fast and reliable, the human lift required to handle edge cases and accelerate adoption is much lower, a practical advantage during rollout.
Casey’s closing advice to other funds captures the practical confidence the team has in the product,
“Don't underestimate the adaptability of the program and the ability of the program to work with your business specifically because every business has specific needs.”
What Makes This Case Study Different
Unlike a single-company story, Bold Ventures is a portfolio problem: the central challenge is heterogeneity at scale. That calls for adaptability, fast vendor support, and a product that surfaces portfolio-level signals without swallowing each company’s workflow. HeronAI’s value here is systemic: it changes the unit economics of fund reporting, allowing monitoring to scale without increasing headcount, and it does so in a way that aligns with Bold Ventures’ mission of supporting founder health and operational focus.
How Bold Ventures cut through Notion chaos and reclaimed 5–10 hours a week.