Knowing that the right tools can help your VC firm operate more smoothly and efficiently, how do you choose the venture capital management software to help you accelerate deal flow and stay ahead of the competition?
In this venture capital management software buyer's guide, you’ll learn about some of the most popular and best-in-class venture capital technology solutions firms use to source, track, and manage their firms’ investments.
Why Excel spreadsheets are no longer enough for VC firms
Keeping track of contacts, potential investment opportunities, portfolio companies, and activity is critical to closing deals, and Excel spreadsheets won’t cut it for most fast-moving VC firms.
Specialized, purpose-built software for capital markets—such as software that better automates data capture and minimizes time wasted on data entry—frees up VCs to do what’s most important: build relationships and close deals.
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What to consider when choosing venture capital management software
Venture capital management software is a combination of tech tools, solutions, platforms, and apps that work together to allow venture capital firms to automate, standardize, and optimize all stages of the dealmaking process.
Here are some of the kinds of tasks you should consider when you’re choosing software solutions for business development, management and operations, and fund management:
- Emailing clients
- Managing company contact data
- Scheduling
- Customer relationship management (CRM)
- Portfolio management
- Raising capital from limited partners (LPs)
- Managing private company data
- Deploying capital to portfolio companies
- Deal origination
- Deal flow management
- Due diligence efforts
- Portfolio monitoring and reporting
- Hiring
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What kinds of workflows can be automated in venture capital?
Manual data entry and repetitive processes take up your venture capital deal team’s valuable time—time that should be spent on investor relations and dealmaking. Look for venture capital management software that includes automated data capture and platforms that integrate with and improve your existing workflows so your team can focus on high-value, relationship-building activities.
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The best software for venture capital management handles complex, sophisticated, non-linear deals with ease with workflow features such as:
Outreach
Venture capital management software with automation for outreach offers visibility into teams, buyers, and deals, so you can always get the warmest possible introduction when it’s time to reach out to investors and prospects. Build long-term relationships and keep your deal pipeline full at all times by scheduling tasks and follow-up reminders.
Deal tracking
Leading venture capital firms are moving to CRM software with relationship intelligence to make it easier to keep track of the contacts, companies, and activities that are critical to closing deals—platforms that manage deals, not traditional sales.
Look for venture capital management software with that offers relationship intelligence—insights into your team’s collective network, business relationships, and client conversations that help you find, manage, and close more deals faster. Other data points in your deal tracking process that can be reviewed alongside these contact details include your team’s KPIs, social media updates, job changes, industry news, and investment management.
Document management
The right venture capital management software gives you quick and easy access to all the documents you need—like tear sheets, dashboards, and reports. You should be able to keep notes private or make them public, allowing teams to efficiently collaborate and share information as necessary.
How to choose venture capital management software for your firm
Here’s what to consider when you’re picking the right venture capital software—or portfolio management software—for your firm:
Budget
Make sure that the features your firm needs are available for the pricing that’s in your budget. Plan prices will vary based on company size, customer support levels, and other factors.
Integrations
Find out what integrations the venture capital management software offers. When your platform integrates with your email, calendar, and messaging apps, you can ensure critical information from all interactions will get captured, so nothing is missed or forgotten.
Time spent on data entry vs. dealmaking
Managing venture capital deals via spreadsheets, email inboxes, and scraps of paper isn’t realistic. Sophisticated, nonlinear deals stem from relationships that can vary wildly from a few days of turnaround time to months or years of relationship management, and there is a lot of data to manage that comes from many different sources.
Manual data entry of all this data is slow and prone to errors, and it also creates silos of information among team members that need to collaborate quickly. For all these reasons, automated data capture is a critical consideration for venture capital firms.
General tools vs. software built for VCs
Right now there is an ongoing, industry-wide shift from general software to specialized, purpose-built software for capital markets. Software that automates data capture, streamlines VC deals, and improves sourcing through data enrichment can free up VCs to focus on outreach, shoring up relationships with stakeholders, and closing deals.
The best software for managing venture capital deals and operations
Here are the most common solutions many venture capitalists consider when building their VC tech stack.
Affinity
Traditional CRMs are often transactional and built for short, funnel-driven sales teams. In contrast, Affinity was made for VC firms’ sophisticated dealmaking workflows and more complex deal cycles.
Affinity’s proprietary algorithms assess and analyze every relationship in your network to help you find the best route to new connections, unify your team’s collective network, and find the best path to the introduction that will create a deal.
Talk to an Affinity team member today to learn how an automated relationship intelligence CRM can form the backbone of your venture capital management software stack.
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Salesforce
Salesforce’s all-in-one CRM software program is the industry standard customer relationship management platform for traditional, transactional sales teams in industries like SaaS, retail, and hospitality. While Salesforce’s cloud tools can be a powerful asset for deal flow management, smaller teams that want to move nimbly and quickly may struggle to harness its full potential. Explore Salesforce alternatives.
Pipedrive
Pipedrive is a web-based CRM and pipeline management tool that offers simple, customizable reporting dashboards for reporting on funnel processes. While Pipedrive allows some degree of flexibility, it’s not a complete relationship or customer life cycle management ecosystem on its own. Explore Pipedrive alternatives.
Navatar
Navatar was built for financial services—from family offices to investment banks—and is known for its pipeline management functionality. This traditional CRM requires manual data entry and relationship mapping to manage your deals and relationships, and its user interface is difficult to navigate without training. Explore Navatar alternatives.
Carta
Carta, previously known as eShares, is an ownership and equity management platform that venture capital firms can use to streamline their back-office tasks. The integration of live cap table data, portfolio management, equity plans, and current company valuations enable VCs to share real-time data with their LPs while reducing manual data entry.
Airtable
Airtable is a relational database platform that surpasses Excel’s limited functionality, making it an ideal tool for venture capital firms that want to track fund performance and portfolio company information during the due diligence phase and beyond.
Crunchbase
Industry-standard Crunchbase helps venture capitalists search for, analyze, and track valuable data points including investment trends, startups, growth industries, and other investors. Crunchbase has over 60 million users and offers data on public and private companies from early-stage startups to global Fortune 1000 companies.
PitchBook
PitchBook offers insights into pre-money venture valuations and is a unique source of data for venture capital firms that want greater insight into potential deals. This tool is known for its consistently accurate and reliable data on the most recent private capital markets transactions and investment decisions.
Calendly
Instead of spending precious time emailing back and forth with contacts to schedule appointments, Calendly scheduling software offers VC firms the ability to easily coordinate meeting times that work for everyone. This frees up financial professionals at private equity and venture capital firms to focus on building relationships.
SavvyCal
Like Calendy, SavvyCal’s scheduling functionality lets users coordinate meeting times. SavvyCal allows deal teams and customers to overlay their calendars on top of the SavvyCal scheduler, eliminating back-and-forth toggling between the scheduling software and personal calendars.
Mixmax
Mixmax is an email automation tool that allows VC teams to streamline their workflows by scheduling meetings, sequencing rule-triggered emails, and viewing statistics, all from within their Gmail accounts. This tool integrates with its users’ Gmail accounts through a Chrome browser extension.
Outreach
The Outreach engagement and intelligence platform offers venture capital teams visibility into deals, buyers, and teams. The software recommends actions based on artificial intelligence, so VC firms don’t have to rely on guesswork for communicating with prospects.
Clearbit
Clearbit is a business intelligence tool that allows venture capital and private equity firms to gather and leverage real-time intelligence about companies and people to improve sourcing, increase conversions, and win deals.
Notion
Notion’s relational database makes it easy to create, categorize, and search notes and research data for companies where your team is doing due diligence.
Public Comps
Public Comps gives VC associates the ability to visualize key SaaS metrics—such as ARR, retention, and payback period—as they are gathering due diligence on companies.
Cap IQ
Cap IQ’s market intelligence platform provides venture capital analysts with qualitative data, research, and analysis on public and private companies. VC teams can access valuation, financial information, security pricing, and much more, so they can better evaluate deals in the pipeline.
AngelList
AngelList is a matchmaking site that acts as a hub for startups, tech companies, and private capital investors looking for deals.
Republic
Republic offers a platform for venture capital teams to access high growth-potential deals across a variety of private markets. Users can access highly-vetted startups and real estate ventures—less than 3% of applicants pass the due diligence and investment committee.
Foundersuite
Foundersuite is a venture capital and investor relationship management software solution designed to connect startups and entrepreneurs with VC firms and angel investors.
Goodbits
Goodbits is an email newsletter tool that helps venture capital firms consistently stay in touch with investors by providing useful content.
Mailchimp
Mailchimp is an email marketing automation platform for managing subscribe lists and creating campaigns to send to investors and prospects.
Jobbio
Jobbio is a job search marketplace that offers services for both employees and employers. Venture capital firms can use Jobbio to attract the best talent, as well as connect directly with other firms and fund managers.
Recruitee
Recruitee’s talent acquisition platform allows venture capital firms to reduce time-to-hire, customize their onboarding, and use API access to unify their HR tech stack.
Selecting software that works the way you do
The best venture capital management software can give you a competitive edge by helping you streamline processes, keep your pipeline full, and accelerate deal flow.
Talk to an Affinity expert today to learn how an automated relationship intelligence CRM can serve as the foundation of your venture capital tech stack to help you track ongoing relationships, so you can focus on closing more deals faster.
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