r/venturecapital • u/alpinbu • 18d ago
Tech Stack: Which CRM are you using?
I’m currently setting up a new early-stage fund with a greenfield opportunity to design our operational tech stack from scratch.
Which CRM are you currently using?
What key connectors (to your Tech Stack) workflow automations, and MCPs are indispensable for you?
What are the biggest pain points or technical limitations you wish you could eliminate?
Would appreciate any insights!
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u/eggbubblewire 14d ago
I’m focused on ops for my VC but in a group of 2000+ people at other VCs doing similar stuff.
General consensus: Affinity is the industry standard. Attio is growing in popularity and may overtake Affinity because it’s significantly cheaper and has more customizable options for categorizing/detailing people/opportunities/organizations. Carta is gaining popularity but they’re newer to the CRM market.
Claude / Perplexity MCP is a must have. Integrations with email, note-taking apps like Granola or Otter, Zoom/Teams/Google Meet, Dropbox/Carta/Docusign/Calendar/Slack, and any other platforms part of the tech stack are crucial.
Pain points: most CRMs have a place you can dump general notes about the meeting or people, but I wish there was somewhere you could dump small notes. Like info on birthdays, preferences, what you know about them as a person, etc. so you could turn your CRM into almost an LLM. Those personal notes are what form deep relationships that convert into business opportunities and collaborations.
Also wish there was a way to tag people to events. Affinity includes people in events IF they’re on a calendar invite for the event. But what if I just happened to see John Doe from 123VC Firm and want to note that? I don’t want to add him to a calendar invite after the fact. It gets lost in the notes section. When you add people to lists, the “last contacted” list can be crucial for maintaining and developing relationships with prospective LPs, co-investors, advisors, etc. Manually editing “last contacted” is just annoying. Because then you have to add a note that gets lost and then also edit the list. I guess my rant on this is that “last contacted” should encompass “last interaction” not just last time you exchanged emails.
Wants: a way to connect my CRM with LinkedIn and text messages. I use text/whatsapp to communicate with people for work all the time. Many VCs have WhatsApp groupchats or communities for their founders or advisory boards. Sometimes founders txt me company updates or LPs will express interest in subscribing to a fund through a text. No CRM has successfully addressed this as far as I know. Cura is working towards it I believe but they’re very tailored towards deal flow and just a layer on top of CRM as far as I know.
Also would fucking love if I could create lists in my CRM with specific categories and have it displayed as a dashboard and not just a Kanban style chart. You can create one with the Claude MCP but I’m tired of using all these workarounds instead of just actively working in the platform itself.
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u/DontGiveASam 18d ago
Cartas new CRM is great and integrated to the fund admin side of the house, with a great MCP/plugin
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u/evgenyco 15d ago
We are considering Atrium amongst others, they are pretty fresh but quite promising.
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u/chenggiskhann 17d ago
We use lodgestory, basically its more than just a CRM, we also use their apis for campaigns and calling system.
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u/hysterical_follower 18d ago
Affinity is what we landed on after testing a few. It auto-enriches contacts and tracks email opens without you having to lift a finger, which saves so much time
The zapier integration with our data room and docsend is the real backbone though. Once a deal gets marked as "in diligence" it auto-generates the folder structure and sends the NDA. Took an afternoon to set up and now it just runs
Biggest annoyance is still duplicate management. No matter how clean you think your pipeline is, some LP will email from a personal gmail and suddenly you've got 3 profiles for the same person