CircleUp Blog: Articles, Reports, and Resources for Consumer Brands

Announcing the New Inner Circle | CircleUp

Written by CircleUp | June.22.2021

A community of resources and engagement for entrepreneurs

Our Mission at CircleUp is to empower entrepreneurs with the funding and support they need to thrive. We believe it isn’t enough to just provide funding, but that support should go beyond the initial investment and solve universal problems fast growing companies face. We’ve heard consistent feedback from entrepreneurs that today’s fastest growing private consumer brands struggle to access data-driven insights, industry introductions, and capital for growth. Today, we are launching a new community experience at CircleUp called Inner Circle — a free, full suite of resources, insights, and online experiences tailored for any high growth, private consumer brand. We’re creating a community for entrepreneurs to have access to what was previously unattainable.

Helio 

Inner Circle leverages CircleUp’s proprietary data and analytics platform Helio, which generates unique insights on consumer packaged goods (CPG) categories, and brands. It algorithmically identifies, classifies, and evaluates early-stage consumer companies to shine a light on breakout brands such as Liquid I.V., IQBar, and Art of Sport.

We gather data from hundreds of sources including:

  • Public data — gathered from publicly available sources, online and offline
  • Partnership data — gathered through our relationships with various partners
  • Practitioner data — aggregated data gathered from our entrepreneurs

This data allows us to track over two million brands over time across 18 billion data points, meaning you get the breadth of possibility, the depth of potential, and the full picture of industry data at your fingertips. Helio is the underlying data engine that powers all insights which benefit participants of Inner Circle. 

Inner Circle Benefits

  • Easy sign-up — sign-up takes less than two minutes on the redesigned CircleUp website
  • Inner Circle Forum access — ask questions and share learnings with other entrepreneurs
  • Curated service provider lists — access providers recommended by CPG leaders
  • Live virtual events — ability to attend live, curated events and gain valuable insights while networking with fellow entrepreneurs
  • Inner Circle Newsletter — get updates on live virtual events, entrepreneur insights, and more

In addition, those entrepreneurs that want access to more tools and resources can soon enable data sharing within their account to gain access to tailored, company specific reports such as valuation tools and benchmarking data. 

Inner Circle has reimagined the concept of access. Gone are the days of completing lengthy forms or surveys just to get costly, generic data that anyone can pay for and isn’t even relevant for most nascent consumer brands. Large public companies have many more tools at their disposal — banks for capital, consulting firms for insights — and we believe access shouldn’t be limited to your size and your budget. Inner Circle solves these pain points by providing a targeted, efficient, and highly relevant solution that equips entrepreneurs with the best possible information for the least amount of time and money.

Inner Circle is now open to high growth CPG brands. To kick off this community, we will be hosting Inner Circle Live, a dynamic, virtual event where attendees will hear from entrepreneurs on how they’ve navigated inflection points of scaling their businesses and led their teams throughout the journey. Sign-up here to join the Inner Circle and access Inner Circle Live on Tuesday, July 13.

Refreshed CircleUp Website

In addition to introducing Inner Circle, we also launched a new, refreshed website that aligns CircleUp more closely with the modern, high growth brands we serve. Everything we do is with entrepreneurs as our focus, so we created a website that acts as a portal for customers and prospective customers to interact with CircleUp in an easy manner. Our new website shines a light on Helio, as well as provides unity and clarity between CircleUp’s brand entities Helio, Equity, Credit, and Inner Circle, with easy ways to access each throughout the site. These launches are only made possible after CircleUp’s years of navigating the CPG space and represents the latest demonstration of the power of Helio. 

To join Inner Circle, please visit the sign-up page on our new website.