How MassMutual Ventures uses Affinity to source better deals 5x faster

Introduction

MassMutual Ventures (MMV) is the venture arm of MassMutual and focuses on enterprise software, FinTech, healthtech, and climate technology investments. With a well-established name in these sectors, the firm benefitted from a steady flow of inbound investment opportunities but no streamlined way to identify the best deals.

Affinity Sourcing provides a single source of truth to quickly access information about companies, surfacing data points the investment team previously had to access outside of the CRM. MMV can now see more companies that align with their investment thesis, cutting through the noise of data to identify valid signals that indicate opportunities.

With Affinity Sourcing, MMV can:

• Access growth signals and metrics—including employee headcount changes, web traffic growth, funding timelines, and leadership changes—all in one place
• Build customized watchlists of companies to monitor, with automated alerts when significant developments occur
• Visualize company growth trajectories over time

Challenge

A dramatically changing investment environment

The 2020s have been defined by waves of change in private capital investing. As Chuck Svirk, Partner at MassMutual Ventures (MMV), says, "There have been peaks and troughs in the market… you had the beginning of COVID, where everything was frozen... and then the markets flipped."

MassMutual Ventures, with over $950 million assets under management (AUM), went from an outbound-focused deal sourcing approach when interest rates were low and people had to move fast, to being inundated with inbound deal flow as capital became less available.

Eric Emmons, Managing Partner at MMV, describes the shift as "a hangover from the funding boom of 2020 and 2021. A lot of companies were funded at that time, some of whom had been funded at high valuations, based on low growth metrics." 

This has resulted in a crowded space of companies looking for their next round or a bridge round, alongside brand new startups.

Faced with this new reality, MMV didn’t have enough time to properly evaluate truly promising deals. “The ability to find the outperformers, to find the teams that have the backgrounds that are relevant... that's really the game," Emmons shares.

The challenge was compounded by a need to manually track external data sources used to evaluate opportunities. The volume of inbound inquiries, combined with a lack of efficiency, left the firm at risk of overlooking the best deals until it was too late.

Solution

Staying ahead of the competition with Affinity Sourcing

MMV has used Affinity CRM for many years, and was one of the earliest corporate venture capital firms on the platform. The team has also now adopted Affinity Sourcing, which has further enhanced their deal discovery and evaluation capabilities.

The tool has fundamentally changed how MMV operates. Before, the firm would spend valuable time stringing together data from disparate sources; now, they work within a centralized system that surfaces data on 200,000 high-growth startups, with options to filter by business model, funding history, stage, and vertical.

"Prior to Affinity Sourcing, we were buying alternative data, and we were trying to cut that data on our own to power the lists and identification in Affinity,” says Svirk. “Now Affinity has brought us back into the platform, which allows us to integrate and closely align our workflows."

With Affinity Sourcing adopted by the whole investment team, MMV can quickly identify sectors of interest and leading companies through thesis-driven sourcing, while simultaneously accessing crucial growth metrics, relationship data, and market signals. Once the firm’s hyper-specific investment criteria is set, it’s easy to surface the companies that fit those parameters.

"If I think about how I source today using Affinity's sourcing tool, I can pull up a company and very quickly see how long it's been since it raised capital, or how its employee count has grown or shrunk,” says Emmons. “I can see if they've had reductions in force (RIFs), or if there have been key employee hires or departures." This equips MMV with comprehensive company information prior to reaching out, positioning them to make faster, more confident investment decisions in a competitive landscape.

Watchlists and alerts in Affinity Sourcing allow MMV to monitor industries and companies of interest with automated notifications about significant developments, from funding rounds to leadership changes. 

“Market mapping used to be a static exercise by investors. We’d try to build a matrix and bucket all the companies by their solution,” Svirk says. “Now you can do this in a dynamic way by adding companies to these watchlists and tracking the KPIs. The watchlist and alerts features really enable our team to take action and connect workflows that were outside of Affinity and integrate them back into the CRM.”

Emmons adds, “If I have the opportunity now to monitor a cluster of competitors… and I can watch growth, key departures, and financings because it all comes to me in a regular email, then I can essentially monitor potentially hundreds of different sub-clusters of interests. I can then passively receive these updates and understand whether or not something has moved enough to change my view, or to make me pick up the phone and put in that first call.”

Results

Sourcing made easier and better-suited for the future

With Affinity, Svirk shares MMV has been able to surface 68,000 people across 44,000 organizations over the course of a decade. “That just speaks to how large the universe is. And you need powerful tools to be able to triage that many deals."

Now equipped with Affinity Sourcing, the firm sees all relevant data in one place and can use it to form a strategy around how to approach opportunities. “We used to have to cobble this together from outside sources, and now this is all built into the platform. This allows me to get this movie of what's been going on in this company, and I can form a narrative and have a sense of how I'm going to structure that first conversation based upon the data I see," says Emmons.

In addition to streamlining information, Affinity Sourcing allows MMV to work more efficiently, eliminating manual work for the firm’s sourcing analysts and helping the team discover and triage investment opportunities up to 5 times faster. "Not only can they find companies of interest and track companies of interest much more efficiently, but then when they do find something, they simply just point us to Affinity, and we can all see the same information,” says Emmons. 

Though Affinity Sourcing was initially designed to improve the sourcing workflow, the firm sees its potential for portfolio management, too. “Writing the checks is easy, right? But showing up to a board meeting, and you have 58 companies in the portfolio, how do you become an expert on that sub segment of every company?” says Svirk. “The ability to build watchlists around your portfolio companies, track what competitors are doing, and show up smarter to the board meeting is another area we're really excited about."

Whatever shape the future of private capital investing takes, MMV will be able to stay on top of the next generation of great opportunities. "Affinity Sourcing is how we look at the market, so we move faster as a team at the end of the day. That's often the difference between getting into a great deal and missing one," says Emmons.