How Brighteye Ventures replaced internal scrapers with Evertrace

Brighteye Ventures is a European venture fund investing from pre-seed to Series A across the future of work, health, and learning. Like most thesis-driven funds, they have always taken sourcing seriously. Senior Associate Ghita Targhi blocks out the first hour of every day for it, working through her network, social platforms, and a set of internal scrapers her team had built in-house.

The scrapers worked. They were also a maintenance burden, hard to filter by sector, and blind to the signals that matter most for a sector-focused fund: when a company is actually registered, when a founder quietly takes a stealth position, when a technical team starts shipping on GitHub.

That is the gap Evertrace was built to fill.

The challenge: no real proprietary deal flow

For a generalist fund, a strong network and broad social presence can get you a long way. For a sector-focused fund like Brighteye, the constraint is different. You do not want every new company in Europe. You want every new company in future of work, health, and learning, and you want to see them before they are visible to anyone else.

Ghita summed up the situation before Evertrace as no real proprietary deal flow, no ability to filter by sector, no visibility into when a company is actually registered, and no GitHub signals. Internal scrapers helped, but they did not solve the underlying problem: founder activity was happening across dozens of fragmented sources, and stitching them into a sector-filtered view was a full-time engineering job in itself.

Why Evertrace fits a sector-focused workflow

Evertrace surfaces founder activity the moment it happens: newly incorporated companies across trade registries, stealth positions at unannounced startups, new patent filings, and other early signals that indicate someone is building. For Brighteye, the difference is that those signals arrive already structured, taggable by sector, geography, and signal type, so the morning sourcing routine becomes a review process instead of a scraping project.

Two signal types in particular have become central to how Ghita works:

• New company signals: incorporations across trade registries, which surface companies the day they exist on paper, often well before any website or public presence.
• Stealth positions: founders and early operators who have quietly joined unannounced startups, which is one of the strongest leading indicators of a fundable company forming.

"It's a must now," Ghita said. "We tried internal scrapers, but nothing like checking Evertrace and being updated daily, with new profiles, new companies registered."

From scraping to acting earlier on deals

The practical change at Brighteye has been speed. Instead of spending the first hour of the day maintaining scrapers and triangulating across tools, Ghita opens Evertrace, filters by Brighteye's sectors, and works through the day's signals. The output of the same hour is a tighter shortlist of companies that fit the fund's thesis, arriving earlier than they would through any networked channel.

The way Ghita put it: "earlier to deals, better signals." Generic stealth signals are not efficient for a sector-focused fund, she explained, because they are not generalists.

That earlier-by-default posture has shown up in real conversations. Asked whether Evertrace has surfaced companies Brighteye would not otherwise have found, Ghita's answer was short: "Many we had have advanced discussions with."

How Ghita describes Evertrace to other investors

When asked how she would describe Evertrace to another investor in a sentence or two, Ghita's framing was direct: "efficient, kills internal scrapers."

That captures something we hear consistently from sector-focused funds. The choice is rarely Evertrace versus another database. It is Evertrace versus the in-house pipeline a team has cobbled together (scrapers, spreadsheets, manual searches) as traditional tools are not early enough, but these tools quietly consumes more associate hours than anyone wants to admit. Replacing that with a daily, sector-filterable feed of newly incorporated companies and stealth positions changes the economics of sourcing.

What's next

Asked what she would love to see Evertrace build next, Ghita pointed to more signals around GitHub and developer communities: the same instinct that drives her sector focus, applied to a different surface. It is a useful steer, and one we are actively working on.

Huge thanks to Ghita and the Brighteye team for working with us on this case study, and for the candid feedback. If you are running a sector-focused fund and finding yourself in the same spot, maintaining internal tooling that almost works, we would love to show you what Evertrace looks like on your thesis.

Book a demo to see Evertrace in action