PORTFOLIO SUPPORT
Help your portfolio companies succeed
Use your network and deal data to support portcos as they grow, raise funds, and recruit
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Get your portcos the people and advisors they need
A poorly managed network means portfolio companies miss out on valuable introductions. Maintain the quality and relevance of your network so you can make the connections that enable portcos to grow.
Rapidly find new hires
Identify and track the right people in your firm’s network—and the best paths to introductions—with long-term engagement and relationship tracking.
Identify and nurture high-value contacts
Strengthen relationships with talent, SMEs, co-investors, and LPs who can provide support to founders.
Drive stronger community engagement
Integrate with email marketing and events tools to manage your firm’s outreach and stay top-of-mind with your network.
Drive faster follow-on fundraising
Finding investors who are willing to invest and align with a company’s stage and industry is critical. Use your firm’s network to analyze the investor landscape, locate the right targets, and make warm introductions.
Introduce your portco to their next lead investor
Track co-investor activity and their investment success to identify the most relevant targets and strongest introduction paths for your portcos.
Share secure and curated investor lists
Kickstart a portco’s next raise by providing them access to live, read-only lists of investors curated by industry, stage, and past investment success.
Build relationships with future investors
Use customizable lists and automated relationship tracking to maintain consistent investor engagement between rounds.
Measure and showcase portfolio support
Monitoring your impact on portfolio company growth can be complex and time-consuming to track. Use reporting dashboards to showcase the results of portco support activities to founders and LPs.
Demonstrate network impact
Track the status and outcomes of founder requests with customizable lists and introductions reporting.
Improve how you support portcos
Uncover and minimize inefficiencies or issues in the portfolio support process with Affinity Analytics and AI-powered meeting notes.
Improve LP reporting
Automate regular updates to track progress, iterate on strategies, and securely share relevant data with stakeholders using Collaborator Seats.
Where to next?
Best practice guide for portfolio management
How top firms support, monitor, and create value across their portfolio companies.
How Highland Europe nurtures its portfolio
Learn how the firm helps companies scale, find and onboard advisors, and hire C-suite execs.
Beyond capital: how to add real value
The ways top investors support portcos—introductions, hiring, fundraising, and advice.
Frequently Asked Questions
Portfolio support is the operating help an investor gives after the check clears: introductions to customers and partners, help hiring executives, connections to follow-on investors, and access to operating expertise. It's the main way firms differentiate in competitive rounds, and the hardest thing to evidence when an LP asks what the firm contributes.
Usually by working the firm's network rather than a search process. The firm identifies who among its contacts has run the function being hired for, or knows someone who has, and makes warm introductions. That only works at scale if the network is mapped across the whole firm rather than held in the board member's memory.
The reliable method is tracking which investors the firm actually knows, at which stage they invest, and when the relationship was last active. When a company raises, the firm can rank likely leads by real relationship strength rather than by reputation, and route the introduction through whichever colleague has the warmest connection.
With counts and outcomes like introductions made, hires placed, customer conversations opened, and follow-on rounds where the firm sourced the lead. Capturing each as it occurs turns the LP update into a query. Pear Ventures has converted 11,467 introduction paths for its portfolio companies, a figure only available because the activity was tracked.
Because it happens in email, between other work, and nobody stops to log it. An introduction is two messages and a calendar invite. Asking a partner to also create a record is asking for a step that will often be skipped. The activity gets recorded only when capture happens automatically from the systems where the work already occurs.
Affinity maps the firm's full network from captured email and calendar activity, so a platform team searching for a candidate, customer, or follow-on investor can see who at the firm holds the strongest connection and when they last spoke. Where no direct path exists, Affinity surfaces the shortest route through a second-degree connection.
Put your firm’s network to work
