How Riverside Standardizes Early-Stage Underwriting with Mosaic

About The Riverside Company

Riverside is a premier New York-based private equity firm with more than three decades of investing experience and over 1,100investments completed to date. The firm invests globally across a diverse range of strategies, including middle-market, micro-cap, and special situations. By combining deep industry expertise with flexible capital solutions, Riverside partners with management teams and operating executives to build and grow high-quality businesses worldwide.

The Starting Point: Rebuilding Models for Every New Opportunity

Like many investment firms, Riverside's deal teams previously relied on legacy Excel model templates to evaluate new investment opportunities. While the firm's investment methodology had been refined over decades, each new opportunity still required investment professionals to recreate that methodology within an Excel spreadsheet. Incorporating deal-specific assumptions frequently meant reworking the underlying model structure, reconnecting formulas, validating calculations, and ensuring outputs continued to flow correctly before meaningful analysis could begin. Although every investment had unique assumptions, a significant amount of effort was spent rebuilding the mechanics of the model rather than evaluating the business itself.

Depending on deal complexity, building an initial model typically required two to eight hours, while more bespoke transactions often demanded additional schedules and custom model structures that added several more hours of work. Beyond the time investment, manually adapting spreadsheets made it more difficult to evaluate opportunities through a common lens, limiting comparability across deals and making it harder to build upon prior analyses.

Riverside saw an opportunity to transform its established investment methodology into a repeatable operating framework, one that could preserve the ability to tailor assumptions for each transaction while
eliminating the repetitive work of reconstructing the underlying model. By codifying model mechanics rather than investment judgment, the firm could spend less time building spreadsheets and more time applying expertise through management meetings, expert calls, commercial diligence, and the analysis that ultimately drives investment decisions.

Mosaic’s Approach: Standardizing the Process, Not the Investment Judgment

Three years ago, Riverside implemented Mosaic to embed its investment methodology into a common modeling environment. Deal teams can now begin each opportunity from Riverside’s established
modeling framework, customize transaction-specific assumptions and analyses, and generate an initial underwriting model without reconstructing the underlying mechanics from scratch.

As a result, initial underwriting models that previously required several hours can now be generated in approximately 15 minutes in Mosaic, dramatically reducing the time required to screen new opportunities
and enabling deal teams to focus earlier on evaluating businesses.

The benefits extend well beyond faster model creation. Because every deal model now follows the same underlying framework, investment professionals can more easily compare opportunities, understand how key assumptions influence returns, and revisit prior underwriting decisions with confidence. Over time, each new analysis builds upon prior work, creating a connected body of institutional knowledge rather than a collection of isolated spreadsheets. The transition also delivers broader organizational benefits. The shared framework also supports associate training and onboarding. New investment professionals can more quickly understand how Riverside approaches deal modeling, how assumptions flow through an analysis, and how key drivers influence returns.

The Partnership: A Platform That Evolves Alongside Riverside’s Investment Process

Implementation marked the beginning of an ongoing product partnership. As Riverside expanded its use of Mosaic across investment strategies, the firm's deal teams worked closely with the product team to
continuously refine core workflows and extend platform functionality. Rather than treating standardization as a static template, Mosaic has evolved alongside Riverside's investment process,
allowing the platform to adapt as the firm's workflows and needs change over time.

This collaborative approach enables Riverside’s feedback to move quickly from idea to production, whether enhancing operating builds, supporting new M&A workflows, or introducing industry-specific
modeling capabilities. For example, when one of Riverside’s vice presidents requested the ability to calculate transaction fees in a more bespoke manner, the building blocks to achieve this were designed,
built, and released within 24 hours.

The Impact: Building a More Scalable Underwriting Process

Today, Mosaic provides Riverside with a centralized environment for early-stage investment screening. New opportunities can be housed alongside historical models, assumptions, and supporting materials,
making prior analyses easier to reference over time while reducing reliance on fragmented files and individual spreadsheets.

In effect, Mosaic has helped Riverside build towards a more scalable underwriting process. Mosaic’s shared modeling foundation improves comparability across opportunities, simplifies onboarding for new
investment professionals, and helps preserve that deal knowledge is retained long after an individual opportunity has been screened or a team member has moved on.

By bringing standardized model mechanics, historical analyses, and deal-specific assumptions into a shared environment, Mosaic has helped Riverside build a more scalable foundation for early-stage
underwriting – one that preserves the flexibility and investment judgment required for each opportunity.

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