Affinity is a software platform designed specifically for venture capital (VC) firms, private equity (PE) firms, and investment banking. It's tailored to address the unique needs of these industries, especially in managing relationships and deal flows.
Affinity is also often used as Venture Capital Management of choice in Private Equity and Venture Capital tech stacks.
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Segment |
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Deployment | Cloud / SaaS / Web-Based, Mobile Android, Mobile iPad, Mobile iPhone |
Support | Chat, Email/Help Desk, FAQs/Forum, Knowledge Base, Phone Support |
Training | Documentation, Videos, Webinars |
Languages | English |
It's intuitive and easy to use. It's great to work across the team, and it's pretty powerful when digging and searching through your network and your allies network.
It can get a bit expensive, but we've found it to be worth it's weight in gold when it comes to relationship management. Finding that right fit customer, client, user, inside of an org., pays for itself.
Mostly sales and investor relationship and search
We procured Affinity when our M&A advisory team moved to a larger platform and we needed a much more robust platform than our generic CRM for tracking all of our collective relationships as a group, and especially so as we added members to our team. All of us have the platform open nearly our entire day, whether to maintain BD worklists, track deal outreach, take meeting / market intel notes, plan marketing campaigns, maintain coverage universes, or quickly refresh ourselves on our past interaction history with a given company / person, among others. Affinity is an unbelievably easy to use platform and has a lot of automation to remove a lot of the manual data entry tasks we used to have to allocate time to.
We occasionally stumble upon small workflow painpoints, but the Affinity team has always been very responsive to feature ideas / requests, up to and including the CEO.
Business development organization and coverage management.
Automatically feeding in email and contact data, their responsive and fantastic CS team, and how easy to use and intuitive the platform is.
Nitpicking here but would be great to have a global view across all our teams, and integration with OneNote if possible!
Improving our deal flow management, and relationship management with our prospective and current portfolio companies. It is making our processes more efficient.
The automatic population of a company record by just entering its name or url.
The less-friendly functionalities to update company and contact details if it does not exist in the Affinity database.
The ability to help track the startups engaged and the status of engagement.
Very minimal manual input is necessary. Highly automated.
I don't need all the email notifications. Have to adjust in my settings.
Relationship tracking, deal pipeline tracking, network development
I love how helpful Affinity is in saving time and gathering information!
N/A - Always happy to see updates & new features though!
I am able to find answers to questions without taking the added time to directly ask someone a question that I can find the answer to in Affinity. I am able to pull information quickly & accurately for anyone on our team!
I've been able to effectively collaborate with key team members to amplify our networks. The ability to have so much collaboration creates more value across our networks. I've also found the product to be extremely easy to use.
So far so good! There isn't anything I don't dislike.
Managing relationships -- tracking recent contact points. Combining networks -- to surface new connections.
Affinity has been a refreshing tool for our CRM, as we migrated from a competing platform to Affinity. We are an investment firm and primarily use the CRM to log contacts, map relationships, strengths of those connections, and map our deal pipeline. The ability to map email activity has been a game changer!
This is not a "dislike" but more of an adjustment for our firm as we transitioned Interface is more "trendy" (e.g. responsive design, sleek interface) which was a cultural adjustment for our firm as we were not used to the more "modern" style versus more traditional CRMs that are more clunky. We also know there are some adjustments and improvements to come in terms of time-series reporting and analytics, which will be helpful.
Firstly, we had a problem previously with communicating with contacts across the team; we'd step on each others' toes but now we've avoided doing so. This has resulted in more seamless communication. Secondly, we have been using Affinity for logging all of our tracked investment prospects. This has been useful in tracking entities across the lifecycle.
Affinity provides extreme clarity on the relationships in our network, especially to overlapping ones. We don't have to manually figure out relationship strengths. That process is time-consuming, and reaching out from the wrong point of contact can lead to dead ends.
Nothing I can think of. Every feature has been useful.
Saves time, optimizes for replies, and helps find the most authentic avenue to engage + keep relationships.
The API and integrations are definitely the most valuable piece of this from my perspective (IT)
The limitations around calculated formulas, although they are working on solving this with integrations into GSheets, and other components.
We're using this as our core CRM that centralizes all the data and information we use to manage our deal pipeline.
The ability to see relationship strength within my network lets me understand who is best able to introduce me or who within my company already knows a company and may have met with them in the past.
We don't keep our meeting notes in Affinity and use Google Docs/Evernote instead as you can't save templates and it's challenging to export for drafting ICMs.
It helps me save time in getting intros to companies and understanding who my colleagues know and which companies they're speaking to.
There are three aspects of Affinity that I like best. The first one is the platform's overall ease of use and the fact that it helps organize our pipeline much more easily. The second aspect is Affinity's Gmail plug-in that allows me to upload an opportunity onto the Affinity platform while I have an e-mail related to the opportunity open. The third aspect of Affinity that I really appreciate is its stellar support team. They helped my company and me on several occasions with building reports and optimizing the platform so that it can meet our needs as closely as possible.
There isn't much to dislike. At one point I was having trouble configuring a report, but, as I mentioned in my third point of what it is that I like best, the stellar customer service came to my aid and helped me quickly resolve my issue.
I don't believe that I have Affinity Relationship Intelligence, but the regular Affinity platform provides insights on the relationships I have and potential introducers that can help me meet new founders.
Affinity makes everything in my network easily searchable, automatically gathers tons of data so i dont have to enter it, and is my go to for managing professional relationships.
It took me some time to get used to the lists functionality, but now that i have it down i make tons of customized lists and use the product for pipeline
Affinity provides me with invaluable insights into my networks, and how to best leverage it to be more efficient. There have been so many times I have used Affinity to remember when I last spoke to someone, what introductions i have given/received, to track down files, etc. that is so much easier in Affinity than trying to remember the right search terms for an email search.
I like how it aggregates data and allows you to add personalised values that can be used to track certain specific data points relevant to our business.
The downsides are that often we input a lot of data, but can't always visualise it in a helpful way to our colleagues. Ends up only being relevant to the users who use it frequently, rather than those in your organisation unfamiliar with the product.
Been able to keep track of important pieces of information relating to our LPs (investors) allowing us to make informed decisions and bespoke and relevant outreach campaigns. Also been able to track the movement of our investors through the pipeline, making it obvious which investors are progressing quicker and more seriously than others, which can serve as a prompt to nudge earlier conversations along the funnel if needs be.
For bigger teams, it is essential to have accurate tracking of all the interactions you have with entrepreneurs, and affinity does this very well. It is a place to centralize most information you have about your pipeline.
There are some minor bugs that still need to be corrected, and it could be easier to export data to excel to extract more specific insights. Would love to see a LinkedIn messages integration.
Affinity basically eliminates the need to constantly message your colleagues asking if they talked to a specific company in the past, increasing the team's productivity.
I like the way Affinity scrapes emails and makes my relationships and conversations known before I reach out to a prospect. Also love how easy it is to create various columns and use filters
I think the dashboards and reporting need some improvement
Multiple members of the team work with a prospect and we need notes and context across the firm to make the experience seamless and this helps us with that
I really like how easy it is to use and track various relationships.
There needs to be an easier way to link various individuals to deals.
Client relation management
Seamless email & calendar integration shows past and upcoming touch points making it easy to maintain momentum. Additionally, the product is being actively developed, the team has already implemented some improvements based on feedback I've given.
Only negatives are the price and the notes feature that doesn't support rich text.
Keeping track of all my active deals Maintaining regular cadence with ongoing partners Ensuring nothing slips through the cracks
Efficiently tracking contacts and relationships
Platform can be quite slow and clunky at times
We are tracking our customer conversations
User-friendly and easy-to-learn CRM platform. Much more adapted to VC use-cases than alternatives (including the CRM we were using before). Brings a significant boost to team productivity in managing deal flow.
Some potentially interesting features are still suboptimal (e.g., data enrichment from external sources is not visible before adding an organization to a list, which hinders deal sourcing).
As a VC, we use Affinity as our CRM for deal flow purposes (not as much for portfolio management). It has been a key tool to improve team productivity and communication.