How Motivate Ventures cut quarterly portfolio reporting from days to minutes
Courtney Trunk is building the platform function at Motivate Ventures, a Chicago-based pre-seed and seed fund supporting ~70 portfolio companies.
After 12 months on Standard Metrics, 4 months evaluating 10 alternative tools, and 2 failed attempts at building portfolio software in-house, Motivate Ventures adopted Cura in early 2026.
What changed:
- Quarterly portfolio reviews became seamless — no more rifling through emails and CRMs. An expected 3-hour slog is now an easy and productive 2 hours.
- LP report generation dropped from days to minutes.
- KPI collection is automatically tracked from ALL their sources in one spot, saving several hours per quarter.
- With Cura’s intelligence, the firm launched a personalized LP marketing and comms function — driving up LP engagement and activating the LP network.
- Dynamic runway tracking flagged a company with dangerously low runway. They’re now in acquisition diligence and will likely land on their feet instead of shutting down.
Before Cura: missing information on more than half of 70 portfolio companies
Most emerging funds are flying blind on a majority of their portfolio. Founders don’t reply to KPI requests. Updates land in 5 different inboxes. The CRM has half the story; Granola has the other half.
Motivate ran into all of it. They were Standard Metrics customers for 12 months and weren’t happy with the response rate or the quality of data they were collecting. They tested email requests. They tested Google Forms. Reporting cycles meant combing through emails, the CRM, LinkedIn, and forwarded updates — manually piecing together what was happening across the portfolio.
“We were Standard Metrics customers for about 12 months, and we weren’t happy with the response rate or the quality of information. It’s hard to get founders to reply to KPI requests and get data from disparate sources all in one place.”
Reporting took several days of work. Information about more than half the portfolio was simply missing.
4 months evaluating 10 tools — and trying to build it twice
Every emerging fund evaluating portfolio software hits the same dilemma. The legacy tools are clunky, expensive, and pre-AI. The build-it-yourself path turns a platform lead into a full-time product manager.
Courtney spent 4 months in that loop. She demoed 10 tools — Standard Metrics (a second look, this time as an “AI-based” product), Visible, Vestberry, PortfolioIQ, Foresight, Smartsheet, Airtable, Notion, Asana. She spent weeks building an Airtable database herself. She tried Replit.
The Airtable approach worked for platform leads running 10-company portfolios. Motivate has 70.
“Portfolio management is not what Motivate is on Earth to do. We are not here to build software. It was either going to be me becoming a product manager full time, or not.”
The note she wrote to her GPs within minutes of the Cura demo:
“If we hired an engineer to build exactly what we were looking for, this is what I would build.”
What Motivate gained: a seamless quarterly review, automated KPI collection, and a new LP comms function
The Portfolio Management Review is now seamless.
The PMR is Motivate’s core operating ritual — 3 hours, every quarter, the whole team in a room going company by company. Scoring, marking up, marking down, deciding who needs attention.
Pre-Cura, it was a spreadsheet on the screen and 4 people rifling through the CRM, the inbox, and Granola — trying to remember who’d talked to whom, hoping nothing important was getting missed.
Now it’s Cura on the screen. Every founder conversation, every metric, every signal already aggregated. The team scores, logs follow-ups, and moves on. Nobody scrambling. Nobody worried they’re flying blind on a company they should know cold.
“We had 3 hours blocked. It only took 2. Everyone said: how do we do this before? And I was like — well, we didn’t do it very well.”
KPI collection is a few minutes, not a few days.
Motivate still sends a quarterly Google Form. Response rate hovers around 50%. The difference is what happens after. Cura parses the responses, structures them into clean per-company notes, and pushes the metrics into the portfolio automatically. For the half that don’t fill out the form, Cura pulls from forwarded emails, Granola transcripts, and Slack threads.
Pre-Cura, that data either lived in a spreadsheet in the void or got manually copied into the CRM. Now it lands in the portfolio in minutes.
Marketing and LP comms became a real function.
This one Courtney didn’t expect. With Cura aggregating product launches, customer wins, and hiring signal across the portfolio, Motivate now has enough material to run an LP communications motion it wasn’t running before — because the underlying data wasn’t there.
“A lot of our LPs are people who work in financial institutions, capital markets people, family offices that own manufacturing and industrials companies. There’s a lot of overlap between our LP base and our portfolio. Now we can bridge the gap between founders and LPs in a much more personalized way.”
How runway tracking turned a likely shutdown into an acquisition
A few months in, Cura’s dynamic runway tracking flagged a portfolio company Motivate hadn’t heard from in a while. 6 months of cash left. The team reached out, pieced together what was happening from customer signal and team activity, and made a call.
“The founders were still operating. They had a handful of customers, but not on the growth trajectory. We were able to introduce them to our M&A advisor. Now they’re going through diligence on a potential acquisition. Instead of teetering on with a handful of customers until they ran out of money, a very qualified founding team is going to land on their feet somewhere else.”
“If we’re not on a board, we sometimes find out about catastrophic things after they happen. Now I can be proactive.”
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