Challenge: Enabling self-service and automation for internal teams

Gateway Private Markets is Asia's fastest growing institutional platform for venture capital and growth equity. They deliver institutional-grade efficiency through a marketplace for global secondaries. Trusted by over 500+ institutions in Asia, they build the infrastructure and tools to drive transactions and sustainable growth in the world's fastest-growing market. Since 2019, Gateway’s data driven platform has provided capital and liquidity solutions to Asia’s leading institutions spanning PE/VC GPs, secondary managers, family offices, banks and financial intermediaries - aggregating over $3Bn in deal flow across 100+ quoted venture & growth equity companies.

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Their mission is to build a better venture ecosystem for all and by all - powering the next evolution of global founders. Gateway is built by innovators with decades of expertise across the financial services industry (coming from global firms such as Alibaba, Barclays, Citi, Factset, GLG, PwC, WeLab), and is positioned to lead and capture the sector’s accelerated growth and advancement.

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To serve their clients more effectively and in a timely manner, Sales, Marketing, and Operations must be able to access and act on actionable data without needing to have a deep technical understanding of the underlying data model. However, with inflexible internal UIs for interacting with their proprietary database and internal API data, these teams encountered hurdles to make effective use of the information and perform optimally:

1. Sales depended on the data team to extract and create client data reports; without a simple self-service solution, this decreased available time for following up on opportunities and engaging with clients.
2. Marketing required the data team to extract and merge data between CRM and internal systems to drive personalized content creation, requiring human effort that could be better used for innovation.
3. Operations had to engage the data team for cross-checking post deal processes across siloed applications.

Gateway needed a solution to build business critical applications for automating and streamlining their internal processes with limited development resources, thus allowing them to continue focusing on building innovative tools that deliver real value for their clients. 

Solution: Superblocks Applications to boost marketing agility 

With Superblocks, Gateway’s Database Admins and Backend Engineers were able to build applications that made insight data easily consumable for their Sales and Marketing teams to move 5 times faster. 

1. Platform operations

To streamline internal operations, the Gateway team needed to maintain the deal pipeline data that is accurate and up to date.  An application was created to allow the internal sales teams to query and update deal-related data.  It allows the internal team to have all information at their disposal and one click away from a related second app to drill into the details.

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The application not only enhanced visibility, but its flexible structure also enabled the Gateway team to code in their specific industry logic to cater to business demands.

Best of all, these applications are entirely self-serve. The business team no longer needs to open a support ticket with IT to connect to their internal RDS instances, fetch or update data in multiple Postgres tables, and generate reports. This tedious process has been replaced with an easy-to-use interface composed of forms, dropdowns, buttons, and tables exportable to CSV or Google Sheets. Business users can visualize the data structure in a way that’s easy to utilize and perform operations themselves, removing friction for the IT team and driving efficient data-driven matching for Gateway’s clients.

2. Email automation for Marketing

Using JavaScript in Superblocks APIs, Gateway backend engineers were able to format SQL table data into HTML and display the result in a Code Editor component on the frontend. The Marketing team can now simply click a button to generate the necessary HTML and copy/paste it into their marketing materials  without waiting on Engineering. Gateway has been able to increase marketing efficiency and build stronger relationships with their community as a result.

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Why Superblocks

1. Turn Database Admins and Backend Engineers into full stack developers

Gateway’s Database and backend team were already experienced with writing SQL queries and manipulating data with Python, but had limited frontend development expertise. With Superblocks, they could create functional user interfaces in a couple hours using drag and drop components, allowing their front-end engineers to focus on external applications for clients.

2. Extensibility with code

The ability to write Python and JavaScript in backend APIs allowed Engineers to surround SQL queries with more complex logic. For example, Python scripts for building conditional WHERE clauses that vary based on user input on the frontend, or JavaScript functions to format table data into HTML. 

Results and future state

With Superblocks Applications enabling the internal business teams, Gateway is continuing to build additional internal applications to enhance their operational efficiency.

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