How Motive Partners increased the number of deals reviewed in one year by 66%

Introduction

Motive Partners is a global multi-strategy investment firm, covering the entire investment spectrum from pre-seed to IPO and buyout.

With a team distributed across New York, London, Berlin, and Amsterdam, Motive Partners struggled with disconnected data sources and inefficient workflows until they implemented Affinity as their CRM solution. Affinity provides the firm with a system of record across their robust tech stack.

With Affinity, Motive Partners can now:

• Track all deals, relationships, and interactions in a single, comprehensive system
• Automatically capture communication history and eliminate duplicate outreach
• Use the CRM’s relationship intelligence to identify warm introduction paths
• Integrate AI capabilities with Zapier for better data-driven decision-making

Challenge

Four offices with disconnected data sources

As a global firm with offices across the U.S. and Europe, Motive Partners faced significant workflow challenges that impacted their efficiency and effectiveness. With dispersed team members handling different investment stages, they struggled with fragmented data and limited visibility into their deal pipeline.

"There were a number of challenges we were facing in terms of being able to cover the needs that we had across both the ventures as well as the PE growth and buyout team," Julia Hubo, Investor at Motive Partners, shares. "Unfortunately, there were missed opportunities, meaning there were introductions to the same companies made by multiple people on the team at times because we weren't tracking who had already talked to any given person." This created confusion and risked Motive’s credibility. 

Attempting to find deal information was also difficult, with data and notes scattered across multiple systems, including an outdated CRM, Excel files, Apple Notes, and various chats on Slack. This was further made difficult by not having any of these tools connected, with Hubo describing the tech stack as "the chaos of disconnected data sources." Without a system of record, "there was no congruency in terms of handing over opportunities, tracking them over longer periods of time,” Hubo says. “Conversations that had taken place in the past got lost." 

Oren Michaely, Head of AI for Motive Partners, shares, "In terms of workflows, the most important thing is having access to the right data at the right time, especially on the venture side. If we're doing our jobs right, we're talking to founders 80% of our day. Without having access to the right data in the right tools, you spend just as much time, if not more, post-meetings with follow-ups and summarizing and trying to look where the right information needs to go."

Motive Partners knew they needed to reevaluate their workflows and tools to manage their day-to-day operations more effectively.

Solution

An automated central hub

To address the challenges the team faced, Motive Partners established an in-house tooling group as part of their "One Motive Platform" initiative, with the goal of creating a standardized approach across the firm. After evaluating options, they selected Affinity as their core CRM solution.

"Affinity soon became our source of truth for all things deals, network, fundraising, etc.," Hubo explains. The platform now sits at the center of Motive's tech ecosystem, integrated with a number of other tools and data sources.

Motive connects multiple data sources to feed information directly into Affinity, creating a comprehensive view of their network and deal pipeline. "We are very fortunate to be able to have all of these additional data sources feed into Affinity, including the data from LinkedIn and CrunchBase, and then Outlook, of course, through the Outlook-Affinity integration that we've set up," Hubo says.

Integrating whenever and wherever possible

Motive used Zapier and the Affinity API to create custom integrations that enhance their workflow. These integrations include daily note counts sent to Slack through the native Affinity-Slack integration for status changes and deal notes, and an integration with Notion to create investment memos. Hubo shares, "This is something that has allowed passive reading on the go through the Slack app for senior partners that are not necessarily going to open up the Affinity dashboard themselves on a day-to-day basis."

Motive has embraced Affinity's AI capabilities and extended them by creating custom solutions that take advantage of their centralized data. “Deal Assist is something that we've loved using at Motive," Hubo shares. "Every single deal opportunity that you've added to your pipeline will have the Deal Assist functionality, and it allows you to query anything that is directly related to that deal page within the deal page."

Michaely emphasizes how Affinity's structured data enables their AI initiatives. "When we start talking about really integrating AI, and specifically agentic AI... context is king,” he says. “For agents to perform accurately and execute well-defined tasks, you need to give them accurate context. When we're talking about our internal deal flow operations, that database is Affinity."

Michaely also adds, "Having a well-defined, clean, golden source data set is more important in the age of AI, and that's a lot of the benefit that we're seeing from Affinity as well."

The Outlook email integration has been particularly transformative for the team. "Automatically uploading all of our emails and email attachments directly into Affinity has been a complete game changer for us... we have everything in one place without needing to do anything, because it's automated,” Hubo shares.

Results

A ready-for-AI tech stack powered by Affinity

Implementing Affinity has transformed how Motive Partners operates, bringing organization-wide transparency and efficiency to their investment process. While specific metrics on efficiency gains are challenging to quantify due to the previously disconnected nature of their systems, the impact has been substantial.

"Affinity sits at the very core of all of our tools. This is, of course, a reflection of us as a firm. Since investments are our bread and butter, Affinity is at the core of our ecosystem," says Hubo. As a result, the firm now tracks over 133,000 people and 65,000 organizations across their ecosystem, and in the first year they started using Affinity they increased the total number of deals reviewed by 66%.

"We couldn't speak more positively about how Affinity has affected Motive as an organization," Hubo shares. "It's almost hard to put a number on the effect it's had on Motive, because there wasn't really a lot of tracking or transparency on where we stood and what our conversion rates were and how many deals were sourced because of the disconnected data sources that we had."

Michaely adds, "Having Affinity as that middle layer database that is the source of truth for everything that flows between the applications feeding data into it, and the consumption of that data has been key."

With Affinity at the center of their tech stack, Motive Partners is prepared to continue their AI-driven initiatives by using their CRM to keep their workflows organized and accurate.