IP Group reduces portfolio review time by 80% with Eliot

The client

IP Group plc (LON: IPO) is the most active UK based, early stage science and technology investor, developing and supporting businesses in HealthTech, DeepTech and CleanTech.

The firm was a founding investor in Oxford Nanopore, whose DNA sequencing technology was deployed internationally during the COVID-19 pandemic; Hinge Health, the digital physical therapy provider now listed on the NYSE; and it also has exposure to Pfizer's next-generation obesity drug programme.

The challenge

Tracking shareholder changes across 100+ companies

Each time a portfolio company issues shares, it files an SH01 with Companies House. Across more than 100 tracked holdings, staying current required analysts to review each filing individually and transpose its contents into Excel by hand. A significant proportion of filings are low-quality scans, which conventional OCR tools handled unreliably. The result was substantial analyst time spent on data entry rather than analysis.

Understanding how entities are connected

Analysing how entities are connected and reading through the filing history was similarly slow. Ownership chains are not set out in any single filing; they have to be assembled from documents filed at different times across multiple entities.

The solution

Eliot's agents monitor the full portfolio and detect new shareholding filings as they are published. The relevant data is extracted, aggregated and delivered in a format that integrates directly with IP Group's internal systems, with ambiguous cases flagged for analyst review.

The same system also gives analysts direct access to each company's complete filing history. They can question it in natural language, and ownership and director relationships are presented as a single visual graph rather than assembled from separate filings.

Outcome

Analyst hours are redirected from manual data entry to higher-value work.