Highland Europe

Challenge  

Investment Partners were relying on deterministic signals like headcount growth and manual research to prioritize deal flow - a process that was slow, inconsistent across Partners, and prone to missing non-obvious opportunities. Each Partner applied their own heuristics with no shared feedback loop, no personalization at scale, and no way to continuously improve prioritization over time. As pipeline volume grew, the cognitive load became unsustainable and high-potential companies were slipping through. The team went looking for a fix. 

Partners tried Claude, but it operated at the individual level with no ability to learn from the team’s collective interactions, no enterprise-grade security and governance. They evaluated over 10 off-the-shelf tools. None could deliver the last-mile customization they needed.

Solution 

Unframe deployed an AI deal flow prioritization engine tailored to Highland's investment workflows - giving each Partner a ranked, personalized company queue with explainable scoring and one-click research briefs. At the core is a multi-signal ML model that aggregates structured CRM data, public news, hiring trends, and company web signals to produce an opportunity score and confidence estimate for every company in the pipeline. By synthesizing across sources rather than privileging any single indicator, the model surfaces 3–5 plain-language drivers per company - giving Partners defensible reasoning behind each recommendation, not just a list they're asked to trust.

Rankings are personalized per Partner, with each queue aligned to the individual's investment thesis rather than a single firm-wide view. As Partners engage - boosting, deprioritizing, or snoozing companies - those actions feed back into the system, sharpening future rankings with every interaction. Before any outreach, a one-click research brief assembles the most relevant company context, eliminating manual preparation. 

Why they chose Unframe

Highland Europe chose Unframe for its ability to deliver immediate value while fundamentally improving how the team sources and prioritizes opportunities.

A critical gap in existing tools was lack of shared learning. While Partners experimented with tools like Claude, those systems operated at the individual level, with no ability to learn from the team’s collective interactions. Each user started from scratch, and insights didn’t compound over time. Unframe introduced a system that gets smarter with every interaction, learning from the entire team and continuously improving recommendations.

Flexibility also played an important role. Rather than relying on rigid filters, Unframe allowed Partners to dynamically adjust how companies were prioritized across different investment theses, without narrowing the opportunity set too early.

Just as importantly, Unframe reduced the operational burden on the team. By bringing together fragmented data into a single, high-signal view, it eliminated much of the manual research required before outreach.

Finally, Highland Europe valued Unframe’s collaborative approach. The platform was shaped alongside their team, with rapid iteration based on real workflows, ensuring it delivered value quickly and continued to improve over time.

About Highland Europe

Highland Europe is a London-based growth equity firm with over $3 billion in assets under management and a portfolio of more than 70 companies. The firm provides growth capital to teams building product-led companies across software and consumer sectors in Europe and Israel.

With a 30-person team, Highland Europe focuses on investing in growth-stage companies that have demonstrated strong customer momentum and clear product-market fit. They target companies that show exceptional potential but may not be on every investor’s radar, seeking out the hidden gems that will become tomorrow's category leaders. Their portfolio includes notable investments across AI, B2B software, and consumer technology sectors, with a particular focus on businesses that are building sustainable, scalable growth engines.