Customer storyInnovation advisoryTrue Capital
An advisory team scouting emerging tech for global brands, brief by brief
True's Advisory team scouts emerging tech for global brands like Walmart, Coca-Cola, and Johnson & Johnson. Innovation briefs go through Extruct: candidates evaluated, shortlists curated, research tables shipped to the client.
- Deep search briefs run since Dec 2024
- 500+
- Candidate companies evaluated per brief, on average
- 1,100
- Innovation team seats on Extruct
- 4 → 9
The work
Innovation scouting for the world's biggest brands
True is a UK investment-and-advisory firm. Its Advisory practice runs bespoke innovation-scouting briefs for the corporate innovation teams at some of the world's largest consumer brands and retailers. Each brief is one-off, judgment-heavy, and rarely sits inside one industry vertical.
The briefs that come in are cross-vertical. Recent ones the team has run on Extruct: startups offering AI-powered price-optimisation tools for CPG, founded in the last ten years; data-intelligence solutions for agriculture companies consolidating ERP with predictive insights; companies solving end-of-life hardware disposal undergoing recent funding rounds.
Different industry every time. Different question every time. Same engine.
Before Extruct
Briefs used to mean weeks of desk research
Innovation scouting at this scale traditionally lives between two failures. Database tools like PitchBook, Crunchbase, and Tracxn return results bound by rigid categories and keywords. They're built for known sectors, not for the bespoke briefs True runs.
Desk research by analysts captures the nuance, but burns days per brief and can't scale across the dozens of mandates a brand advisor runs in parallel.
Either way, the early-stage, niche, and international companies get missed. Those are the companies innovation teams care about most.
What changed
December 2024
True's Advisory team put Extruct into the workflow. The shape of innovation scouting inverted. An analyst writes a brief in plain language. Extruct evaluates around 1,100 candidate companies against it, scores each for relevance, and returns a shortlist. The team enriches the shortlist in a research table with whatever extra context the client needs, and ships it. A brief that used to mean a desk-research week now happens in a working session.
“We type what we want, it builds the list, researches everything, drops it in Affinity CRM. Game changer.”
At scale
What two years of continuous use produced
500+ deep-search briefs run
Each one a custom analyst-grade scouting task, written in plain language.
1,100 companies evaluated per brief, on average
A candidate pool no human would assemble or read manually.
40,000 companies surfaced across the work
CPG, pharma, retail, media, sustainability, supply chain, food tech: same workflow, every vertical.
174,000 AI agents run
Each one a research task asked of a candidate company: background, founders, traction, fit against the brief.
4 → 9 innovation team seats
Throughput that used to need a research firm now runs as a workflow.
Across the work
Walmart. Coca-Cola. Johnson & Johnson. Warner Bros. 7-Eleven
Different industries every time. Walmart for retail. Coca-Cola for CPG and beverages. Johnson & Johnson for healthcare. Warner Bros for media. 7-Eleven for convenience retail. The same workflow runs for all of them.
Want this on your team?
A 30-minute call. We ask about your setup, share how we’d approach it, and see if Extruct is a fit.