Editor’s note: Deckmatch uses artificial intelligence (AI) and advanced analytics to transform investment deal flow for venture capitalists. By storing extensive, in-depth company data in Cloud SQL for PostgreSQL, Deckmatch can quickly provide investors with comprehensive insights on startups and their competition. Eliminating the manual effort required to generate this data frees investors to focus on more strategic initiatives and empowers them to make timely investment decisions with confidence.
When we started Deckmatch, our vision was clear — we wanted to build a premier solution that gives venture capitalists deep insights into potential portfolio companies and their competitive environments, with minimal manual effort. To do this, we needed a powerful and flexible database that could handle large volumes of data, support advanced vector-based search, and allow us to deploy artificial intelligence (AI). Google Cloud’s managed PostgreSQL database offering — Cloud SQL — was the natural choice given that we’ve long relied on the high performance, flexibility, and broad support of PostgreSQL for essential data operations.
Putting our money on cloud architecture
At the heart of our cloud architecture is a pgvector-equipped Cloud SQL database that integrates with a powerful suite of Google Cloud services. PostgreSQL’s pgvector extension allows us to deliver the fast, efficient, and relevant similarity search capabilities that are critical to our platform. We can now easily perform the complex vector operations that underpin our advanced embedding algorithms for competitive mapping and semantic search. In turn, efficient embedding storage and querying powers fast, contextual search capabilities that yield relevant insights quickly.
To give our clients direct access to the Deckmatch platform through an easy-to-use interface, we built a high-performance REST API using FastAPI. We also host the entire application on Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE), which gives us a scalable, reliable, and secure platform to deploy our service. Finally, native integration between Cloud SQL, GKE, and Vertex AI allows us to deliver a robust, responsive experience for investors seeking in-depth startup intelligence. Vertex AI reduces the resources required by conventional search methods while enabling search accuracy and advanced analytics to help customers keep abreast of market complexities.
Rich payoffs with Cloud SQL
Our clients have benefited tremendously from the capabilities enabled by Cloud SQL. With Deckmatch’s competitor landscape mapping offering, venture capitalists can quickly get the critical data they need to understand the competitive environment and position themselves strategically. Additionally, the semantic search capabilities supported by Cloud SQL’s pgvector support make it possible to perform nuanced searches for companies across a range of criteria and get precise, context-aware results.
Internally, the biggest win for us is that as a fully managed PostgreSQL service, Cloud SQL eliminates operational overhead like backups and updates, freeing our small team to focus on developing core application features. Cloud SQL’s intuitive interface and seamless integration with other Google Cloud tools makes setup and ongoing management incredibly straightforward while further enhancing the developer experience with streamlined provisioning and management tools. Plus, Cloud SQL grows as our application does, enabling us flexibly scale database resources on demand.
Google Cloud is our seed capital for the future
Our aim is to establish Deckmatch as the go-to resource for comprehensive insights on pre-seed and seed-stage companies. We’ll continue to rely on the Google Cloud ecosystem as we hone our application to create the most effective and user-friendly resource in the market.
As we’ve grown — and continue to grow — Google Cloud expertise and resources have been invaluable. Being part of the AI startup program within the Google for Startups Cloud Program, granted substantial credits that allowed us to significantly offset our initial infrastructure costs. This freed up crucial funds, enabling us to invest more heavily in development and accelerate our growth. From rich documentation resources to expert technical support helping us optimize our cloud architecture, Google Cloud has been instrumental in our journey.
We believe our strong vision, combined with Google Cloud’s technical capabilities and support, has given us credibility in the startup ecosystem and primed us for success.
Getting started
Ready to unlock the power of a fully managed relational database service with access to generative AI capabilities? Try Cloud SQL — trusted by over 95% of Google’s top 100 customers. Leverage this jump start solution to easily get started building gen AI applications using GKE and Cloud SQL.