CRM for a VC firm: deal flow, LPs, portfolio and network

01Why a standard sales CRM falls short

A sales CRM follows a deal to signature, then moves on to the next. A firm signs a handful a year and passes on hundreds: the negative decision is its most frequent output, and it keeps its value. The company passed on at seed sometimes returns at the next round, and then you need to find why you said no, and who knew them.

A firm also sells, in the other direction: it raises from LPs, over a cycle of several years, and those relationships cross over with the portfolio. One contact can be the founder of a holding, a co-investor on a deal and an LP in a vehicle. The method for treating each pass as an option is in the deal flow guide. What remains is the tool that makes it possible.

02The data model to set up on day one

This layout takes 3 custom objects and 2 pipelines, and the Pro plan opens 5 and 3. It also connects LinkedIn or WhatsApp, and the Max plan both: the full grid is on the pricing page. Relations run between objects, many-to-many included: an LP subscribes to several vehicles, a vehicle holds several positions, and each record shows what is linked to it. Each object gets its own views, and each pipeline its own stages.

For reference, Affinity's help center, checked on November 7, 2026, organizes everything into three types of lists: people, organizations, opportunities. Its examples put deal flow and portfolio in organization lists, LPs and fundraising in opportunity lists. That is where the choice sits: lists that carry fields, or full objects that you link.

03The network: who knows this founder, and on which channel

At a firm, the strength of a relationship often decides the deal. Kasar computes it from the exchanges it syncs: email, meetings, LinkedIn and WhatsApp messages. Each contact and each company shows the relationship strength, the date of the last exchange and the team member with the strongest connection. The partner preparing a call knows who to talk to first.

The channel matters, because a founder rarely writes to an investor by email alone. Affinity's relationship intelligence page describes, as of November 7, 2026, a score built on email and calendar, and its tutorial says a LinkedIn conversation gets logged by hand. The Kasar vs Affinity comparison lays out the gap channel by channel.

04Confidentiality between partners

A partner does not want to expose a whole mailbox, and an LP does not expect their exchanges to circulate around the team. In Kasar, the inbox stays personal. Each person chooses what colleagues see of their exchanges recorded on records: Full content, Subject + metadata or Private. Exclusion rules, by address, domain or subject, get set before the mailbox connects. Row-level access control, on Max, then limits each user to the records that concern them.

05From first meeting to investment committee

An investment memo feeds on dozens of meetings. In Kasar, a meeting recorded by the Chrome extension or imported from Fathom arrives with its transcript and summary, and a Granola note with its summary, attached to the participants. Before the committee, Leo sums up the deal when you ask. Claude or ChatGPT can also query the transcripts through the MCP server and its 42 tools, and answer from the passages cited.

Then comes the follow-up. A sequence writes to a list of founders or LPs from your own mailboxes and stops at the reply, which lands on the record. An automation starts from an event, “Pipeline stage changed” for example, and creates the task for the next stage in the analyst’s name. Nobody has to keep a reminder sheet next to the CRM.

06Bringing over what you already have

07Five questions to ask before you choose

• On which channels is relationship strength computed, and which ones need logging by hand?
• Are the pass reason and the reopening condition filterable fields, or text in a note?
• Are LPs, vehicles and holdings linked objects, or separate lists?
• At which plan do automations, API access and the MCP server begin?
• What does a colleague see of your exchanges, and who decides?

Compare cost at the plan where those answers turn to yes. Affinity's pricing, checked on November 7, 2026, shows $2,000 per user per year on Essential, $2,300 on Scale and $2,700 on Advanced, billed annually. Kasar's prices are on the pricing page, per seat per month, with a Free plan to begin.