Samsung Next is the corporate venture arm of Samsung, investing in founders building in health tech, AI, robotics, consumer services, and frontier technology. With a portfolio of more than 350 companies, the team's mandate goes beyond financial return. As Jinny Lee, Senior Venture Ops, at Samsung Next put it, "we invest opportunistically in founders pursuing the imagined and impossible."
The Challenge: Reporting to a Global Corporation, Not LPs
Most traditional venture funds report to Limited Partners, but Samsung Next reports into a global corporation as a corporate venture capital (CVC) entity, which changes what "good data" looks like.
"Our portfolio data doesn't just inform investment decisions, it feeds monthly reports, committee reviews, and strategic conversations with business units across headquarters that are often looking for genuine partnership and technology fit, not only financial return," Lee said. "That means we need clean, current, and defensible data on every company at any given moment, and we need to slice it by sector and by strategic relevance to Samsung, not just by fund economics."
Before Visible, collecting that data was entirely manual.
"Collecting updates meant individual email chains to founders, chasing responses one by one, and then re-keying whatever came back into spreadsheets," Lee said. "Valuations and metrics were tracked across separate files, so a lot of my time went into reconciling numbers across multiple systems, our internal sheets, and whatever founders happened to send over. Every reporting cycle essentially started from scratch."
As the portfolio grew past a few hundred companies, that approach stopped scaling. Samsung Next needed a repeatable, structured way to collect performance and valuation data across the whole portfolio on a set cadence, without spending weeks each cycle sending and chasing individual emails.
Finding a Solution That Fit a Corporate Structure
Samsung Next first heard about Visible through a trusted referral. The team evaluated other platforms before choosing Visible, but what set Visible apart was its flexibility in a layered corporate structure.
"What tilted us toward Visible was that it was clearly the most accommodating to our layered corporate setup," Lee said. "We needed something flexible, and Visible was. It also just made everything feel easy and fast."
With 350+ portfolio companies to bring onto a new platform, onboarding was the real test.
"Onboarding was the piece we were most concerned about with the other options," Lee explained. "With 350+ portfolio companies, having a simple way to get everyone loaded into the system was a real make-or-break for us. Visible made that easy, and their team was incredibly supportive throughout: they helped us onboard all 350+ companies and then stayed on top of every request with us. That hands-on support was a big part of why the rollout went smoothly."
That partnership continued well past onboarding. "As early customers, we were given the privilege of sharing feedback on our experience, and what's been amazing is how quickly the team acted on it," she added. "Improvements we asked for were almost always live by the next round of surveys we sent. It felt like a real partnership rather than just using an off-the-shelf tool."
A Regular Request That Runs Itself
Samsung Next runs a regular request through Visible across its entire portfolio.
"Today it's a recurring request that goes out to the whole portfolio through Visible," Lee said. "I set up the request with the metrics and valuation fields we need, Visible handles distribution, reminders, and tracking. I get a live view of who has completed it plus automatic notifications as each company submits, so instead of chasing everyone I can focus follow-up on the handful still outstanding. What used to be weeks of individual outreach and manual data entry is now largely automated end to end."
That structure has changed how founders experience the process, too. "Because requests come from a consistent, recognizable Samsung Next channel on a predictable cadence, founders increasingly treat them as a legitimate, expected part of working with us," Lee said. "The process is light on their side, which keeps it from feeling like a burden, and that ease is part of why trust has grown."
Faster Reporting, Sharper Decisions, and More Confidence Upstream
Consistent, structured data collection has changed what Samsung Next can do with the numbers once they come in.
"The data we collect through Visible feeds directly into the reporting we do for Samsung: monthly reports, committee materials, and capital and valuation updates," Lee said. "Because the numbers come back structured and consistent, I can move much faster from raw responses to the polished views HQ needs, and I'm far more confident the figures are accurate and current when they land in front of leadership."
Two outcomes stand out most to Lee. "First, our data is far more accurate. We can now reliably compare each company's current status against our fund positions. Second, it's saved a huge amount of time on the outreach itself; contacting portfolio companies for updates used to eat up a big chunk of every cycle, and Visible has largely taken that off our plate."
That time savings has changed the pace of decision-making across the team.
"Having current, portfolio-wide data in one place means we spend less time assembling the picture and more time acting on it. When leadership or a business unit asks about a specific company or sector, we can answer quickly and with confidence rather than kicking off a fresh data-gathering exercise each time."
Layering AI on top of that structured data has added another layer of quality control.
"Combining Visible's data with AI has made our portfolio monitoring faster and more reliable," Lee said. "We can benchmark a given metric across every company in seconds instead of stitching spreadsheets together. It’s also a useful first pass for spotting outliers - an unusual figure worth double-checking against what a company reported last period."
Bring Your CVC Portfolio Data to Light With Visible
Samsung Next's experience offers a clear takeaway for other corporate venture teams evaluating a platform built with traditional VCs in mind.
"Don't let the 'built for traditional VCs' framing stop you," Lee said. "The core need, collecting clean, structured data from your portfolio on a cadence, is identical; what's different for a CVC is who consumes it downstream. What mattered for us was flexibility: could we capture the fields HQ cares about, add our own notes and exemptions, and get the data out in a form that fits corporate reporting? Visible handled all of that, so its traditional-VC origins were never a limitation."
For CVCs weighing whether the added complexity of corporate reporting lines makes a tool like Visible worth adopting, the answer, in Samsung Next's experience, points the other way.
"The added complexity of corporate reporting lines is exactly the argument for adopting it, not against it," Lee said. "The more stakeholders you answer to, the more you need a single, trustworthy source of portfolio data, and the more time you save by not rebuilding that picture manually every cycle. For us it's paid off in both hours saved and in the confidence we have when the numbers go up to leadership."
Want to bring this kind of time-savings and confidence to your own portfolio reporting? Learn more about how Visible supports investor teams here.
