Understanding Affinity’s API roadmap

Modern APIs are critical to the success of data-driven VC and other private capital firms. And this represents an ever-growing cohort. The annual Data-driven VC landscape report found that from 2023-2024, there was a 22% rise in the number of data-driven firms worldwide.

Without effective APIs, data-driven initiatives flounder. Disconnected systems create data silos that block complete deal visibility, valuable insights are trapped in separate platforms, manual data transfer creates errors and wastes time, and an incomplete data picture leads to missed opportunities.

For firms using the Affinity CRM, Affinity’s API V2 solves these challenges and more. Keep reading as Ben Docksteader, Principal Product Manager on APIs, explains how this suite of modern APIs breaks down data silos between critical systems—ensuring complete visibility into your relationships and deal flow with data synchronization that powers faster, more confident investment decisions.

What is API V2 and what will customers be able to do with the new APIs?

Affinity’s API V2 represents a new suite of modern APIs we’re developing here at Affinity. With powerful API connectivity, we’re helping customers:

• Access a unified view of all deal data 
• Maintain perfect data synchronization
• Incorporate all relationship touchpoints 
• Eliminate duplicate records across systems

Here’s a little more about the new and upcoming releases:

Write API for List Fields: This set of APIs speaks to perfect data synchronization. The APIs make it much easier to update a list’s fields with easy bulk options for updating all of a record’s fields at once. This means fewer API calls to update relationship and deal lists, less work to make field updates by eliminating the need for field value IDs, and a cleaner and more scalable integration experience.

Interactions and Notes APIs [coming soon!]: These APIs relate to incorporating all relationship touchpoints. They dramatically improve the way firms query their interaction data, which will unlock new ways of reporting and analyzing it. 

Challenges that customers have previously reported with iterating through data, extracting in bulk, and identifying duplicates will all be solved for, which means they can spend more time analyzing the data and less time figuring out how to get it out of Affinity.

Duplicate management APIs [coming soon!]: This set of APIs will help customers eliminate duplicate records across systems. In addition to improving our Duplicate Manager itself, all duplicates will be able to be managed via the API. This means that if a customer wants to run their own algorithms to identify duplicates, they can! There will be no need to manually do the merging or resolution in Affinity. Instead, they will be able to perform merges directly via the API.

Bonus: Head to 24:00 in this product release webinar to learn more about Affinity’s API strategy.

Why did the team develop API V2?

Critical to any CRM platform is its ability to integrate with the rest of a firm’s tech stack. We know that in private capital, VCs spend a lot of time optimizing the various parts of their tech stack to ensure their firm is set up for success in critical areas like AI, data, internal reporting, notetaking, and more. 

We’re seeing the rise of data-driven VCs and many of these firms rely on the Affinity CRM as their central nervous system, which is great. But our V1 APIs were limited in how they could help in the critical use cases outlined above. The reality is, these APIs were built early on at Affinity with different use cases in mind and when the industry was still maturing. 

It became clear that our customers needed more, and that meant developing a new set of modern APIs that solved for the pain points in V1 and enabled them to build integrations with any other platform in their tech stack. 

Are Affinity’s V1 APIs going away?

Over time, the plan is to phase out V1 APIs as the same functionality is supported in V2. This will start with the Read APIs, which are already supported in V2. Firms using Affinity will receive plenty of notice and time to migrate to V2 endpoints. 

To learn more about these announcements, stay tuned to our API updates by ensuring you are set up as a Technical Contact in the CRM. This can be done by navigating to Settings > API (under Data & Privacy) > ‘Technical Contact(s)’.

What’s Affinity's goal with API V2?

Our goal is to level up the standards we use to develop APIs across the board. Not only are we improving existing APIs and creating new ones, but the standards on how we test, release, and maintain APIs are improving, too. 

Our new standards help developers know what to expect from our APIs and the way we communicate upcoming changes will help them prepare for what’s coming next. We expect that these new APIs will drive more development by third-party platforms in building integrations with Affinity. This will really expand how our customers can use their network and deal data to drive business workflows across the firm.

How did the team approach building the new APIs?

As we develop each new API, we look more holistically at the product area in question. This includes assessing what issues there might be in our data or performance layers. Doing this helps us in two ways. It allows us to improve our data model and make it easier for customers to understand, and it enables us to build on a performant foundation designed for use cases that need to extract data from Affinity in large quantities.

Ultimately, this ensures the new APIs stay fast and dependable even as our user base and the volume of data we process increase.

How has customer feedback shaped the API roadmap?

Customers are paramount to our development of new APIs. Their feedback is what helped us shape our new direction and it’s how we prioritize the most important areas to invest in. 

Much of the feedback from customers has focused on enabling more efficient APIs that can reduce API calls and handle the bulk nature of many private capital use cases. For example, this is why our Field Writes API supports writing up to one hundred fields in a single API call, and why our upcoming releases will have more support for querying data en masse.

Ready to get started? Sign in to start using the Write API for List Fields, contact your CSM for more information, or explore the API documentation.

Remember to bookmark the latest releases page to ensure you never miss an update.

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