Affinity

Affinity develops a customer relationship management and relationship-intelligence platform aimed at private capital, including private equity and venture capital firms. The system automatically captures emails, meetings and calendar interactions across a firm, removing manual data entry, then enriches that activity with Affinity's proprietary data and more than 40 external sources including Pitchbook, Preqin and Grata. It scores relationship strength from actual communication patterns, surfaces warm introduction paths to decision-makers, and flags relationships that are going cold or coverage gaps in a firm's network.

The product line includes Affinity CRM, launched in 2017 as the company's flagship product, and Affinity Ascend, an agent platform of purpose-built agents that prepare meeting briefs, capture conversations, and write pipeline and CRM updates back into the system for private capital deal workflows. Affinity also operates as an open platform, connecting its relationship data into tools such as Claude, ChatGPT and Snowflake via an MCP integration. Configurations are presented for both PE workflows (multi-fund complexity, deal-level privacy, banker and adviser coverage tracking, LP relationship depth for IR teams) and VC workflows (high-volume dealflow, founder relationship tracking, scout and co-investor networks, thematic sourcing). The company states it complies with SOC 2, ISO 27001 and GDPR.

Founding story

Co-founders Ray Zhou and Shubham Goel started Affinity in 2014 after observing that two decades of software had been built for transactional sales relationships while nothing had been designed for the long-term, relationship-driven dealmaking that underpins finance, professional services and real estate. They concluded that legacy CRM failed because relevant relationship data sits not in static systems or contact managers but in passive email, calendar and public-data streams, and set out to build infrastructure that plugs into those streams.

Business model

Affinity sells software to institutions on a demo-led enterprise basis; the website's primary calls to action are requests for a product demonstration of its CRM and agent platform.

Sales of its CRM and relationship-intelligence platform to private capital firms and other relationship-driven institutions.

Traction

Affinity reports 3,300+ private capital firms using the platform worldwide, 25 billion+ emails and calendar events captured, 15 trillion+ enrichment points and 130 billion+ structured relationships; its about page cites 550 million+ relationships mapped and 22 billion+ interactions captured and analyzed. At the time of its Series C the company reported over 18 trillion processed emails and calendar events, 70 million+ automated contact profiles, 10 million+ relationship insights and more than 1,700 institutional customers, with clients including Woodside Capital Partners and Tishman Speyer.

Latest developments

Affinity has introduced Affinity Ascend, a platform of purpose-built agents that prepare meetings, capture conversations and update pipeline and CRM data, and has opened its relationship data to external AI tools such as Claude, ChatGPT and Snowflake through an MCP integration.