PE Stack and Holland Mountain present the first initiative to map AI / GenAI use cases and key vendors in Private Equity and wider private capital.
Valu8, Delio, Arcesium, Integrum ESG, and more- see the latest from these vendors in our weekly vendor news digest! News categories cover deal activity, partnerships and integrations, vendor whitepapers, and others.
Our latest Special Report, produced in collaboration with Untap helps our users understand the portfolio monitoring and value creation sector, including selection considerations and criteria. It also contains a Product Brief covering Untap and our verdict of this platform.
See a map of relevant vendors in the deal sourcing and execution space for private equity and venture capital. We cover software, data, and intelligence services - CRM, market data, diligence, alt data, relationship intelligence and more…
Affinity, a leading relationship intelligence platform (click here to view our primer on Relationship Intelligence) today announced a new integration with Pitchbook, a leading provider of financial data and technology.
Users of Affinity will now be able to see additional investor and company data directly on the Affinity platform, allowing for:
Companies: Get information on the industry, location, demographics, financing, assets under management, and more on both public and private companies.
Investors: Review details on a company’s investors and assess fund performance to gauge their experience.
Funding: Explore granular funding data, including funding type, amount, date, and post-money valuation.
If you are an Affinity user (full disclaimer, PE Stack uses Affinity and we love it) then you won’t need any further explanation. But for the uninitiated , here’s why this integration is so important.
Affinity helps its users to understand relationships and improve business development and outreach through its intelligent mapping and prediction models. Adding sources of third party data allows for:
More intelligent outreach: through allowing users to better understand a target company’s current situation with funding, financial status etc.
The discovery of new and adjacent routes to forming relationships: by seeing which companies worked with other companies. For example, discovering and then leveraging existing relationships with investors in a target company to gain warm introductions.
Saving valuable time: by eliminating the need to have two platforms open at the same time, searching via two different platforms, manually importing information.
In order to access the data, users will need access to both platforms.
For more information on Affinity, Pitchbook, and other data and relationship intelligence tools, please view our free Vendor Profiles platform, or give us a call at our Los Angeles office - +1 818 964 1576
We have seen a lot of interest in relationship intelligence tools for private equity and venture capital in 2019, it's one of the most commonly viewed solution types on our platform.
This speaks volumes of current market conditions and how competitive areas such as fundraising and deal-sourcing have become. Relationship intelligence has the potential to quickly add significant value to these activities and more, with an implementation process that is relatively painless and some truly innovative and exciting new platforms being launched in the past few years.
With some help from leading industry experts we put together a three-page Sector Focus report to help our users better understand the key features and value-adds. We are grateful to our contributors from RelSci, Affinity and 4Degrees.
If you'd like to learn more about this area, you can view full profiles for relationship intelligence platforms on our Vendor Profiles platform. It contains detailed information on over 125 software, data and network providers in the private equity and venture capital space. Or give us a call and we'd delighted to help you achieve a best-practice technology stack.
Affinity, one of the fastest-growing and most talked about relationship intelligence platforms, just raised an additional $26.5mn with backing from Advance Venture Partners, Sway Ventures, MassMutual Ventures and Pear Ventures.
Affinity intends to use the new injection of funds to continue building out its platform.
The San Francisco-based company uses a machine-learning, technology approach to relationship management and CRM. I’ve had an opportunity to use the platform myself, and so far I’m very impressed with what they have built.
I intend to put together a more comprehensive overview of the solution once I’ve had more time to experience all the features, but here are some of my initial impressions:
Setup – the initial setup is really easy, it automatically populates based on your email account and immediately starts plotting relationship maps. I was up and running within minutes.
Import – the data import wizard is great, mapping fields is simple, and duplicates are dealt with automatically. I noticed very few glitches or issues here.
Built for PE – the team clearly ‘get’ private equity workflows such as fundraising and deals. There are some powerful inbuild tools here to help manage day to day activity, including a feature which alerts you to emails which require a response or follow-up automatically.
Built for lazy people – ok, lazy is perhaps not the best word. But we all have all worked with people who loathe CRM and hate to enter details of interactions they have had. I’ve seen people with their own personal spreadsheet (saved locally of course), or even the dreaded ‘human-brain-based-rolodex-combined-with-Outlook-search-function’ approach. Too bad you can’t clone brains when such employees depart!
Affinity is awesome for these people. It pulls data in from emails, automatically tracking relationships over time and helping users to stay on top of tasks. For people that are always on the road and don’t have time to be meticulous with CRM data entry, Affinity offers some great functionality. For example, if I were to receive an email from a new contact at a new firm, Affinity would log that interaction automatically, add a new firm entity on the platform and pull in any data on that entity from external sources to facilitate background research. For firms that struggle to get employees to add these things, this is a compelling feature.
As mentioned, the system automatically links your contacts with their companies and then pulls in external background data from a number of sources (such as Crunchbase) to provide background information. This is very useful and worked flawlessly for me. That said, I would like to see some additional industry databases available for integration here, especially on the LP side.
Relationship mapping works well. I’ve seen this kind of technology used before with mixed results, but the Affinity relationship mapping and ranking system is powerful and accurate – so if I want to find a path to talk to a company or individual, the platform will show my how I can get there via relationships I have. The platform even lets you add industry ‘Allies’ which can help to expand your ability to get high quality introductions.
My assessment so far is that Affinity is a powerful platform which offers some compelling functionality. It’s been designed with human nature in mind, pinpointing many of the areas where CRM can fail due to humans failing to update things properly. Seems to me that implementation should be straightforward compared with other CRMs I’ve seen, although I haven’t seen how things would fare for a big organization yet.
Look out for a proper in-depth view in the next few weeks…
