Juniper Square offers an AI-driven CRM to upgrade IR teams

Service provider Juniper Square has launched a customer relationship management system tailored to investor relations professionals, one that is designed to enhance fundraising via artificial intelligence.

The product, AI CRM for Investor Relations, is underpinned by its agentic AI platform, JunieAI. It is meant to automate IR tasks and improve data usability.

Jay Farber, general manager of Juniper Square’s GPX unit, noted the responsibilities of IR and cited a slew of important data-handling tasks in an interview with Private Funds CFO.

“It’s a sales effort, it’s a business development effort,” he said about IR work. “And that means that the data – it needs to be tracked, captured, stored, analyzed, shared – is some of the most critical data that exists inside of GPs.”

Sponsors have myriad key data that pertains to aspects of LP relationships, Farber noted. “That’s, ‘hey, who are we meeting with? Who do we have connections with? What are we talking to them about? Most importantly, what are they telling us? And how does that inform where we go from a product strategy perspective and from a fundraising perspective, so that we hit our goals and have the capital we need.’”

Existing CRMs aren’t set up specifically for IR, Farber said. Instead, IR teams have either turned to general-purpose CRMs or ones that are geared toward deal teams.

Efficiency and data access

Farber said that Juniper Square’s CRM offers two benefits. The first is by improving efficiency, given the sizes of teams and the opportunity set they face.

“If you are an IR professional today, you’re likely on a team that is understaffed relative to the fundraising market,” Farber said.

But he noted that the other benefit is quicker access to key data.

“There’s so much data sitting inside both your CRM, and third-party data sources and public data sources that you might have access to. And there’s no software that’s helping you identify what are the really important pieces of data that should inform where I spend my time, who I go out and talk to, who’s got a new mandate coming soon.”

The service provider noted that its CRM improves the IR team experience in three ways.

For one, it keeps track of LP activities and generates summaries of them. Second, it includes an in-app chat feature, which supports activities such as document sharing, disseminating invitations to data rooms and producing summaries of transcripts from meetings.

Finally, it can be tied in with the calendar and e-mail systems from Microsoft and Google. Juniper Square noted that this connection, which is on a two-way basis, “automatically keeps CRM contact records up-to-date, eliminates hours of tedious data entry work and maintains data permissions and confidentiality.”

Fundraising context

The service also launched its CRM with the current fundraising climate in mind, Farber noted. “What we heard from our clients and from the market is, you have a bunch of folks for whom it was very easy to raise capital up until about 2022, and then it got hard.”

Farber added that GPs initially responded by slowing down the pace of their deployments and have usually had an investment period of about three years.

But sponsors that held off still face a challenging environment, as they have to fundraise again, albeit with signs of improvement. Farber noted that this state of the market necessitates greater productivity from IR teams and other colleagues that do related work.

“They need to be twice as productive if they’re going to raise the same size fund, or even a bigger size fund than they raised a few years ago.”

Farber noted that using traditional CRMs – given that they entail entering manual information updates – and having to separately search for data serve as obstacles to GPs looking to reach out to prospective investors.

And staying on top of information gleaned from LPs is crucial. As examples, Farber cited types of investment strategies and fund structures that they have expressed interest in.

“Keeping up with the pace of information that you get from LPs, and being able to aggregate that, summarize that and make decisions off of it, is really important,” he said.

With its capabilities, Juniper Square’s CRM is designed to keep the promise of staying apprised of IR details with a fraction of the hassle.