What shipped in August: New Lists is here, and it's not the only thing that got faster

Written by

Anna Shimoda

Last updated

August 26, 2026

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August was about handing control back. Every release this month gives your team more say over something Classic made you fight for: how fast your data loads, who sees a sensitive deal, when you prep for a meeting, and which relationship paths you can actually act on.

These four releases push on the parts of the job that slow investors down. Here is what shipped, and what each one changes for your workflow.

New Lists is rolling out in stages. We’ll notify you when your account moves over, but you don’t have to wait for the email. Switch anytime from the Lists options menu.

New Lists is here

If you work in Classic Lists, you know the daily workarounds. Exporting to Excel just to sort your own data, rebuilding the same filter every session, or clicking through several steps to make a routine edit. New Lists removes all of them.

Large lists now load in seconds, so the list you avoid opening because it stalls becomes a list you can actually work in. Finding the right companies takes seconds instead of minutes, because you can combine AND/OR logic across every field that matters, sort by up to five fields at once, and save the views you return to. And you spend less time fixing data and more time sourcing, with one-click inline editing, keyboard navigation, and copy/paste that behaves the way it does in a spreadsheet.

That speed changes how two jobs feel day to day. When you’re sourcing, AND/OR filtering on connection strength or relationship score lets you triage dealflow faster than a single-field filter ever allowed. When you’re qualifying deals, a saved custom view means the filtering setup you built once for a given deal type is waiting for you next session, not rebuilt from scratch.

New Lists also adds capabilities Classic never had:

Exporting: send your Lists data to CSV whenever you need it somewhere else.
Field and option management: create and manage dropdown, ranked dropdown, and status fields, including their options, right from the column header. Build the fields your workflow needs without waiting on engineering, add records without leaving your list, and undo a removal with one click.
A rebuilt Kanban view alongside Sheet View, so you can manage your pipeline visually and switch to a grid when you would rather work in rows.

We’re honest about the gaps, too. A handful of Classic capabilities are not in New Lists yet: bulk actions (copy to list, remove, convert to opportunity, bulk email), inline filtering from a column header, inline dropdown and status option creation, trigger rules, importing data, comments, and collaborators. You can keep using Classic for now while we close the list. Read the Lists help doc for the current state of each.

Introducing Restricted Opportunities

Take-private and public-to-private deals create a hard tradeoff. You want the deal in the pipeline so it counts toward staffing, reporting, and dealflow visibility. But every extra person who can see it adds material non-public information risk in the US, and breaks "need to know" requirements in Europe. Firms have worked around this with fragile substitutes: third-party masking tools, a separate list for each sensitive deal, or keeping the deal out of Affinity entirely.

Restricted Opportunities removes the workaround. Mark an individual opportunity as restricted, then set an allow list of exactly who can see it. Everyone else still sees the row in lists, Kanban, and Affinity Analytics, so pipeline counts stay accurate, but the name and every field are masked. Enterprise Admins always keep full visibility, and the masking holds across web, mobile, extensions, and the API.

This is deliberately not the same as team- and role-based permissions, which Affinity already offers. Restricted Opportunities is built for the confidentiality problem specifically: reducing MNPI exposure and supporting need-to-know practice on the deals where that matters most. Treat it as risk reduction and operational best practice rather than a guarantee of legal compliance. Your compliance team still owns that call.

Enterprise Admins turn it on under Settings > Opportunities > Allowed Opportunity Types. Read the Restricted Opportunities help doc to set it up.

ICYMI: on-demand meeting briefs

Last month's Ascend launch gave you the Meeting Prep Agent, but it only ran on the day of a meeting, and only if you had monitoring turned on. Now you can generate a brief whenever you want one.

From the Meetings panel, choose Generate Brief for any external meeting, or View Brief if one already exists. A Start Your Day module lays out your external meetings by day, so you can prep tomorrow's pitch tonight instead of scrambling an hour before. Generate a brief on demand walks through it.

ICYMI: Inferred Connections, now with investor and executive history

Inferred Connections already surfaces likely relationships from shared work history. This release adds a second signal: investment history. When someone in your firm's network was an investor at a company, Affinity reads that history and surfaces the paths it implies.

Here’s where it earns its place. Say your firm doesn’t know anyone at a target company. A colleague's contact once invested in a firm that funded that target, which makes that contact a likely bridge to the target's leadership, and Affinity surfaces the path instead of leaving you to reconstruct it by hand. Confidence scoring runs quietly in the background to rank what surfaces; you’ll never see it as a number.

This release covers company profiles. It doesn’t yet extend to individual people's profiles, global search, mobile, the side panel, or the Chrome Pathfinder extension. Understanding Inferred Connections has the details.

How August's releases fit together

New Lists gives every team a faster default: a place to filter, sort, and edit that keeps up with the work. The other three hand you more control on top of that speed. Control over who sees a sensitive deal. Control over when you prep for a meeting. Control over which relationship paths you can act on. Faster underneath, more deliberate on top.

Sign in to see what has already rolled out in your account, or talk to your account team about turning on Restricted Opportunities for your firm.