It’s a big day for Affinity. We’re excited to announce that we’ve raised $80M in new financing to bring relationship intelligence to the world’s dealmakers.
This round of funding was led by Menlo Ventures, with participation from Advance Venture Partners, Sprints Capital, Pear Ventures, Sway Ventures, MassMutual Ventures, Teamworthy Ventures, and Brian Sheth from ECT Capital Partners.
Tyler Sosin, Partner at Menlo Ventures, will be joining our Board of Directors. At Menlo, Tyler has invested in a wealth of SaaS businesses at the intersection of sticky systems of record and dominant network effects. We could not be more excited for him to join our team.
This funding round is an incredible vote of confidence for our vision to create a world where anyone can cultivate and fully harness their network to succeed. Since we founded Affinity in 2014, our relationship intelligence platform has processed and structured over 18 trillion emails and calendar events, and automated the construction of over 70 million contact profiles and 10 million relationship insights for over 1,700 of global institutions—all in the service of enabling dealmakers to find, manage, and close more deals using Affinity CRM.
Our journey so far
When we first had the idea for Affinity, we observed that while a lot of software has been built over the last 20 years for transactional relationships and transactional sales, nothing had been designed for what we saw as the relationship-driven economy and the relationship-driven dealmaker.
Few would dispute that relationships are among every organization’s most valuable assets. But different kinds of relationships need to be managed differently. The transactional relationships that the world of retail, hospitality, and consumer goods rely on are very different from the long-term relationships that power the universe of finance, professional services, and real estate.
We saw an enormous potential market for a new kind of relationship-management platform for that universe, especially when these organizations have had to suffer from using transaction-focused legacy CRM and deal-tracking software.
The failure of legacy software has ultimately been a failure in data. The majority of the world’s relationship data doesn’t live inside a static system like a legacy customer relationship management platform, or a contact manager like LinkedIn, but in the enormous and passive streams of “data exhaust” that everyone in the world already generates, but few think about.
Email exhaust, calendar exhaust, public data exhaust about people and companies: these are massive, ubiquitous protocols with the power to free dealmakers from the drudgery of managing data manually while simultaneously arming them with relationship insights they could not get anywhere else. Six years ago, we noticed that no one had built a seamless way to plug into all of these exhaust streams to make that possible.
At Affinity, we believe that building this data infrastructure will unlock a whole new class of products that will power the entire relationship-driven economy. Our ambition is to develop and own that entire software stack. In 2017, we launched Affinity CRM, our flagship product. Since then, it has set a new standard for 1,700 global institutions across private capital, banking, consulting, real estate, and the Fortune 500.
What’s next
This new funding will enable us to accelerate bringing Affinity to every relationship-driven industry in the world. As much of the world shifted to remote work over the last 18 months, our mission became even more urgent as reliance on digital relationship-building increased on an incredible scale. As the pandemic has progressed, we’ve seen enormous growth across the financial and professional services sectors, from banks like Woodside Capital Partners to commercial real estate developers like Tishman Speyer have become Affinity clients. We are excited to support the acceleration of that growth.
We are also doubling down to build the future of relationship intelligence. Data, and doing magical things with that data, has always been at the heart of Affinity’s mission. We are now investing in our next quantum leap in this arena—from integrating new datasets into the Affinity platform, to deploying machine learning models that will transform that data into new insights, to embedding those insights seamlessly into every app that dealmakers use to build relationships and create deals.
Our launch of Affinity Analytics this April was just the beginning: our next generation of product releases will turn our customers into data-driven technomancers with superhuman insight into every relationship and opportunity.
Finally, this funding will help us continue to make Affinity the most beautiful and powerful CRM experience in the world. We have a slew of updates and new features coming that will continue to push the envelope for what it means to deliver a relationship platform and CRM that dealmakers actually love using every day. And we think this is just the beginning.
If this mission excites you—join us! Check out our open positions or just drop us a line at careers@affinity.co.
And to everyone who has been part of this journey with us: thank you. We would not be here without you, and we truly cannot tell you how excited we are for the road ahead.
Onward and upward,
Ray & Shubham
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