How MassMutual Ventures transforms portfolio support and network management with Affinity

Introduction

MassMutual Ventures is a multistage global venture capital firm investing in financial technology, enterprise SaaS, healthtech, climate technology, and cybersecurity companies. With teams based in London, Singapore, and Boston, MMV manages over $1 billion in investment capital across the globe. We help accelerate the growth of the companies we partner with by providing capital, connections, and advice. With our deep expertise and extensive network, MMV helps entrepreneurs build compelling and scalable companies of value.

MMV needed a CRM that could support their VC workflows and help them more effectively engage with their portfolio companies, parent company, and broader network.

MMV chose Affinity as their CRM because of its ability to automatically capture the firm’s network, emails, and overall activity on an ongoing basis, and in one central system of record. The firm now has visibility into all three of its distinct funds and their investment activities, allowing them to provide comprehensive portfolio support.

With Affinity, MMV can now:

• Understand the full extent of their network across three funds
• Gain insights related to deal flow and surface enriched data that allows the team to have more effective meetings and conversations about investment decisions
• Quantify the impact of their portfolio management activities, helping them track towards their annual recurring revenue goal

Challenge

Missed contacts and opportunities

Having visibility into your firm’s network is a major contributor to accessing the highest quality investment opportunities. It’s also a key part of portfolio support, ensuring the right introductions that will help portcos effectively scale.

MassMutual Ventures (MMV) focuses on enterprise SaaS, cybersecurity, financial technology, healthtech, and climate technology companies. As a CVC in the insurance space, they can provide a wealth of knowledge and experts to support their portcos’ growth.

But MMV faced a complex set of challenges in managing their vast network and relationships. Samantha Santaniello-Lawrence, Head of Platform shares, “there was no consistent way in which our portfolio companies were getting introductions to potential commercial relationships and partnerships. Our investors’ core function is to invest, and they were just doing portfolio support off the side of their desk."

This was complicated by siloed information across teams and the limitations of their legacy systems. "Our large life insurance company did not have the technology that a modern VC needed to do their job," says Santaniello-Lawrence. 

There were different approaches to managing deal flow and no shared way to know how vast MMV’s network actually was. MMV realized they needed a way to understand that network—along with all the communications happening within it—to streamline workflows across multiple teams and funds.

Solution

Unlocking a network to drive better collaboration and workflows

After evaluating multiple options, MMV chose to implement Affinity as their CRM. The firm onboarded within 60 days, including full email and AWS integration. 

“We started working with Affinity to help us give us some contextual information around our network,” Santaniello-Lawrence says. The firm has been able to instantly surface email communications with 67,000 individuals and map those individuals across 43,000 organizations, creating a comprehensive view of the whole network. 

Affinity has helped transform how the firm manages their investment pipeline and deal flow across the three funds operating under the MMV brand. The team now has visibility across all stages of their deals, from initial sourcing through to portfolio support. "What Affinity allows us to do is get good insight into our deal flow, our sourcing abilities, and our network across the board,” says Santaniello-Lawrence. 

The investment teams use Affinity's structured lists to track their investment pipeline, log board meeting notes, and manage their extensive network of co-investors and industry contacts. Advanced reporting capabilities have proven to be a major gamechanger, as Charles Svirk, a Partner at the firm, shares: "The high-level reporting that Affinity enables has been invaluable in terms of surfacing information to the C-Suite." 

Portfolio support that’s scalable and quantifiable 

Once a company joins MMV’s portfolio, the firm provides comprehensive support to help nurture and scale that portco. 

Santaniello-Lawrence has built a support program with two foundational pillars: accelerating portfolio growth and strengthening their partner network. “The former is how we can leverage our network to drive introductions for our portfolio companies to potential partners, placing key talent hires. and then also connecting to our parent company,” Santaniello-Lawrence says. “The other is strengthening our partner network to drive more introductions to our portfolio. We leverage Affinity to help manage all of this and provide measurements.”

Santaniello-Lawrence describes their approach: "I often get introduced in the due diligence phase to share how we are providing value-added services to our portfolio companies. We use Affinity to manage our quarterly meetings with our portfolio companies and track all platform work, including placing key talent, making commercial and partner introductions, placing advisory and independent board seats, and supporting due diligence."

Post-investment, there’s a comprehensive onboarding, with the "90s" program serving as a cornerstone of their implementation: 30 minute meetings every 90 days with portfolio companies. "We have a fairly detailed onboarding process to understand what's going on with the portfolio company, what they are doing well, and how I, in my role as Head of Platform, can support them," explains Santaniello-Lawrence.

By using Affinity to capture portco activity and these important touchpoints, MMV can quantify their platform efforts. Santaniello-Lawrence and her team have a goal of facilitating introductions that lead to meaningful annual recurring revenue for their portfolio companies. Using Affinity's searchable lists and analytics capabilities, the team can easily pull metrics on total contract value and other key performance indicators, providing holistic visibility into their deal flow and portfolio support activities across the entire organization.

Results

One CRM and network with multiple workflows

The impact of implementing Affinity has been transformative for MMV's operations and portfolio support capabilities. Eric Emmons, Managing Director, shares: "Within weeks of moving to Affinity, we were able to easily discover and manage the thousands of entrepreneur and venture community relationships already latent within our team. What's more, the Affinity Alliances professional network has helped us quickly build new and valuable connections."

The CRM’s robust data enrichment and reporting capabilities help provide concrete goal-setting and tracking. "As a Head of Platform focused very much on revenue excellence, I have a goal every year to help our portfolio companies close deals resulting in annual recurring revenue via introductions made by me," notes Santaniello-Lawrence. "Affinity is where I keep track of how well I'm doing, and at year end, I say, 'hey investors, these are all the contracts I helped close.'"

Affinity has also unlocked opportunities among the firm’s portfolio companies. "One of our portfolio companies was prospecting, and the Affinity Pathfinder Chrome plugin allowed them to see that we had connections to one specific company they wanted to get connected to. We made the introduction, and they are now likely going to do business with one another," Santaniello-Lawrence shares.

Perhaps most significantly, Affinity has enabled MMV to take a data-driven approach to their operations. Santaniello-Lawrence shares, "The beauty of Affinity is to prompt these interesting conversations about the data that we're all looking at every day."