How VCs, Brokers, and Investment Banks Use Helio to Evaluate CPG Brands

Not all that glitters is gold. But you knew that already.

What many don’t know, however, is how to mine for the gold that others have yet to find — especially in fast-paced CPG categories like beauty, food, beverage, and pet. Spotting emerging trends that people will be obsessing over the course of the next month, year (or two!) isn’t exactly easy.

Making bets on emerging consumer brands is a risky gamble without deep insights on your:

1. Deal flow
2. Viability of your target businesses
3. Competitive landscape
4. Customer preferences and feedback
5. Total addressable market (TAM) intel

In other words, you need to understand whether the business model in question represents flash-in-pan fads or more lasting trends that have legs.

Innovative venture capital firms, brokers, and investment banks should leverage various sources of real-time data to make smarter investment decisions.

With the right tools, VCs, banks, and brokers can unleash the power of forward looking intelligence to uncover actionable insights to more efficiently forecast demand, analyze trends, and understand what consumers will want next.

The data is out there — but acquiring, sorting and processing it can be overwhelming. That’s one reason why so many investment opportunities are consistently missed.

Helio is a data and insights Saas platform that makes it quick and easy to uncover forward-looking, data-driven CPG insights. Helio empowers the CPG investment community and broader service provider
communities to improve strategic decision-making in order to bring on brands with the highest future potential rather than those that have already peaked.

The Helio Overview

Helio is a self-service data platform that enables users to track CPG trends, analyze several competing brands for specific criteria, and more.

By pulling metrics from 1.5 million+ CPG brands and 200+ data sources, Helio can identify trends before they go mainstream.

Helio is the most comprehensive intelligence data source of emerging consumer brands on the market, which means you get actionable insights from more brands and more sources — and you can do it all faster.

Our VC, broker, investment banking and broader service provider clients (brokers, distributors, accelerators, agencies) use Helio to:

1. Uncover forward-looking insights about trends, categories, customers, channel mix, and competitors.
2. Identify brands with perfectly-timed growth potential.
3. Communicate findings in a user-friendly and compelling way.
4. Compare brands based on attributes, track key purchase criteria, search customer reviews, and easily analyze key performance metrics.
5. Find and contact brands with unique characteristics, so they’re building relationships at the exact right time.

How VCs, Brokers, and Investment Bankers Evaluate Investment Opportunities

While no one-size-fits-all metric exists for evaluating an investment target, our VC, broker and investment banking clients have their own system of metrics to evaluate consumer sentiment and TAM data alongside outcomes and operational KPIs of the company.

Sometimes, however, your own system just isn’t enough.

To get a holistic and predictive grasp and win big in your portfolios, you need to:

Identify emerging brands, categories, and trends. Initiatives fail when other firms identify a hot opportunity before you do. Helio makes it easy to search for brands that are already addressing a given attribute with their product, so you can decide if pursuing that trend is going to be worth it.

Predict growth potential for brands and entire categories before someone else does. Without Helio, you’re left analyzing information that everyone already has. But with Helio’s proprietary predictive analytics, our clients are able to project whether or not a brand might outperform its competitors.

Access and filter unique data on a granular level to gain never-before-seen at-a-glance insights. Our clients love being able to find exactly what they need, like which brands have launched certain products within specific retailers.

Price deals appropriately. Granular-level data helps inform offers to help you avoid overpaying for a deal. With Helio, you no longer need to worry about keeping up with CPG trends that are either evaporating right now or about to evaporate.

Key Helio Features for VC, Broker, and Investment Banking Clients

Helio users find the best deals early and build confidence in their targets before making a play. Our clients discover brands and analyze insights to know if they’ve found a fit in less than three clicks by:

1. Gathering the most comprehensive TAM analysis possible before making an investment decision.
2. Understanding how big the market is, the brand density inside the desired category, and the key growth dynamics of winning brands.
3. Getting an instant snapshot of a brand’s revenue range, # of retail doors, online visitors, and social following.
4. Quickly comparing related and competitive brands for faster analysis.
5. Accessing key purchase criteria for consumers shopping in a particular category or for a particular attribute.
6. Analyzing trends that are emerging versus those that have already peaked, to inform predictive data-driven decisions.

The Helio Difference

So what makes Helio different from other CPG data platforms?

We’re comprehensive. We pull from 1.5M+ brands and 200+ sources — the broadest dataset in the emerging CPG space. This means you leverage the full picture to make better-informed and more confident decisions.

We keep you ahead of the curve. Because we’re able to identify emerging brands and trends before they peak, you catch your competition off balance. As a result of predictive analytics, you’re more likely to be the first on the scene of investment opportunities.

More than online metrics. Because we dig deeper and beyond the most commonly used data points, you access the universe of current digital, social, online and offline sales performance data. With this holistic picture of performance, your analysis becomes predictive, so you find the best deals — and you find them early.

We scale with you. We know different firms have different needs. That’s why Helio’s features support a wide variety of needs.

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Profiting from emerging trends means operating with a sharp focus on innovation and predictive analytics. Identifying and taking advantage of future growth pockets means out-executing the competition and elevating your overall portfolio results.

Learn more by requesting a demo today.