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Overview

Understanding Concrete’s core concepts will help you get the most out of the platform. These key features work together to transform your communications into organized portfolio intelligence.

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Touchpoints

Touchpoints are how Concrete organizes portfolio company communications into meaningful, categorized events. Instead of scattered emails and documents, touchpoints group related communications by topic, time, and company.

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How Touchpoints Work

  • Automatic Creation: AI analyzes email content and groups related messages
  • Smart Threading: Connects discussions about the same topic across different email threads
  • Company Context: Links all communications to the relevant portfolio company
  • Time-based Clustering: Organizes contextually similar communications around the same time period
  • Multimodal: Touchpoints are comprised of emails, meetings, notes, files and more. Viewing a touchpoint displays all of the sources that contributed to it.

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Digests

Digests are AI-generated summaries that provide high-level insights across your portfolio or for specific companies. They compile key information from touchpoints, emails, meetings, and files.
Concrete’s Portfolio Pulse presents a list of recently updated digests across your portfolio.

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Companies

Companies represent your portfolio investments. Each company profile serves as a central hub for all related communications, touchpoints, meetings, files, and people. Concrete tracks companies beyond those in your portfolio. Many times these records are automatically created based on email analysis. Still, only emails originating from companies inside of your portfolio are automatically tracked.

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Emails

Email processing transforms your Gmail inbox into intelligent portfolio insights by automatically analyzing, categorizing, and extracting key information from your communications.

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How Email Processing Works

  • Focused Scope: Only portfolio company emails are analyzed. Concrete further filters to only show the most relevant communications.
  • Real-time Monitoring: New emails continually monitored and processed
  • Touchpoint routing: Intelligently groups related content across multiple threads and sources
  • Crawling: Depending on your preferences, Concrete indexes content behind important links within emails

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Security & Privacy

  • Read-only Access: Never sends or modifies your emails
  • Encryption: All data encrypted in transit and at rest
  • Access Controls: Team-based permissions
Use Concrete’s email forwarding to pick up any email you want to analyze or crawl, regardless of whether it originates from a portfolio company.

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Meetings

Meeting management helps you track, document, and analyze portfolio company interactions from board meetings to informal check-ins.

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Meeting Types

  • Board Meetings: Formal meetings with structured agendas and documentation
  • Check-in Calls: Regular informal meetings for company updates
  • Advisory Sessions: Strategic guidance and consulting conversations

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Meeting Intelligence

  • Pre-meeting Prep: Context review and agenda creation
  • Documentation: Notes, decisions, action items, financial updates
  • Follow-up Tracking: Monitor completion of action items
  • Pattern Analysis: Communication frequency and participation trends

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Integration

  • Email Threading: Connects pre-meeting, meeting, and post-meeting emails
  • Document Association: Links board decks, reports, and supporting materials
  • Touchpoint Creation: Meetings automatically generate touchpoints

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Files

File processing automatically handles documents and attachments from your portfolio companies, extracting key information and making everything searchable.

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Supported File Types

  • Documents: PDF, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Google Workspace files
  • Images: PNG, JPG with OCR text extraction
  • Specialized Formats: Financial models, presentations, legal documents

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File Sources

  • Email Attachments: Automatically processed from emails
  • Direct Upload: Manual upload with drag-and-drop interface
  • Cloud Integration: Google Drive, Dropbox sync (coming soon)

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AI Processing

  • Content Extraction: OCR and text recognition
  • Intelligent Analysis: Topic classification, entity recognition
  • Metadata Extraction: Financial metrics, dates, strategic information
  • Search & Discovery: Full-text and semantic search

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File Categories

  • Board Materials: Board decks, meeting materials, resolutions
  • Financial Documents: Statements, KPI reports, financial models
  • Legal Documentation: Contracts, corporate documents, compliance filings
  • Product & Operational: Updates, research, operational reports

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How It All Works Together

These concepts are interconnected to provide comprehensive portfolio intelligence:
  1. Emails are processed and organized into Touchpoints
  2. Files attached to emails are categorized and linked to Companies
  3. Meetings generate documentation that becomes Touchpoints
  4. Digests summarize insights across all Touchpoints, Companies, and activities
  5. Everything is searchable and accessible through company profiles and timeline views
This integrated approach ensures that no important portfolio information gets lost and that you always have the context you need for effective portfolio management.