Attio for Venture Capital
A venture fund lives or dies on two assets: the deals you see and the people who send them to you. Most days the work looks like this. A partner forwards a founder intro from a portfolio CEO, an associate logs a first call, someone checks whether the firm already met this team at seed, and a principal pings three operators in the network to vet the founder before the partnership meeting. Affinity was built for exactly this motion, which is why so many funds run on it. The question is whether you still need its price tag, or whether Attio covers the same workflow for far less.
The four jobs a VC CRM has to do
Dealflow tracking comes first. Every fund runs a pipeline from inbound and sourced through first meeting, partner meeting, diligence, term sheet, and decision. Founder relationships come second, because a no today is a yes in two years if you keep the thread warm. Network mapping comes third: who in your network can warm-intro a target, and who already knows the founder. Portfolio support comes fourth, where you track follow-on rounds, hiring help, and customer intros for companies you already own. A fifth layer, LP relationships, runs alongside fundraising and reporting.
Affinity handles the first three well. Its relationship-intelligence engine reads your team's email and calendar to score who has the strongest tie to a given person, and it auto-enriches company records so an associate does not type in a Series A size by hand. Those are real strengths, and a junior team that wants zero setup benefits from them. The trade-off is a fixed data model and a Scale plan that runs about $1,917 a month.
How the same workflow runs in Attio
Attio gives you objects instead of a fixed schema. You build a Companies object for startups, a People object for founders and operators, a Deals list for the active pipeline, and a separate Portfolio list for owned companies. Each one carries the attributes your partnership actually argues about: round stage, check size, ownership target, lead vs follow, sector thesis, and the partner who owns the relationship. You wire email and calendar sync so Attio logs every founder touch without anyone forwarding a thread.
For warm intros, Attio's connection strength surfaces which colleague last emailed a target and how often, so you route the ask to the person most likely to land it. For portfolio support, a single Deals-style list tracks each company's next round, board dates, and open asks, and you trigger a Slack alert when a portfolio CEO replies to a hiring intro. The API and webhooks let you push new deals into a sourcing channel or pull enrichment from your own data sources, which a fund running its own scout network usually wants.
The numbers a managing partner cares about
Cost is the cleanest argument. Compare the two plans most funds land on.
| Item | Affinity Scale | Attio Pro |
|---|---|---|
| Monthly cost | ~$1,917 | ~$690 |
| Monthly saved | ~$1,227 | |
| Annual saved | ~$14,720 | |
Annual billing trims roughly another 20%, and Dialed adds 10% off your Attio plan on top of that. A migration runs about 15 hours of work, near $3,000 at $200 an hour, so the payback lands around 2.4 months and the 12-month ROI sits near 391%. Run your own seat count through the migration calculator for a figure tied to your fund.
What Dialed moves off Affinity
A test migration comes first, free, so you see real records in a sandbox Attio workspace before you commit. Dialed maps six object types: People, Companies, Lists and saved views, Notes, Opportunities, and Files. Your Affinity Organizations become Attio Companies, Persons become People, your pipeline list becomes a Deals object with stages mapped to a status attribute, and notes keep their author and timestamp. The one piece that does not copy is Affinity's relationship-strength score. It regenerates in Attio once you reconnect the same inboxes and calendars, so the warm-intro signal returns within days.
Funds that also run growth-stage deals or later-stage follow-ons should read the Attio for growth equity page, and partners who co-invest alongside family money will find the Attio for family offices page useful for the privacy and co-invest workflows.
See what your firm saves switching to Attio →FAQ
- Will Attio track warm intros the way Affinity does?
- Yes. Once you connect your team's email and calendar, Attio scores connection strength so you route an intro request to the partner with the closest tie, the same job Affinity's relationship intelligence does.
- Can Attio handle both my deal pipeline and my portfolio in one workspace?
- Yes. You build a Deals list for active sourcing and a separate Portfolio list for owned companies, each with its own attributes, and link both to the same People and Companies records.
- What happens to founder notes from old meetings?
- Notes migrate with their original author and timestamp and stay attached to the founder and company records, so a partner can still see what an associate wrote two years ago.
- How much does a VC fund save moving to Attio?
- About $1,227 a month, near $14,720 a year, comparing Affinity Scale at roughly $1,917 with Attio Pro at roughly $690, before the 20% annual discount and Dialed's extra 10% off.
- Do we lose dealflow history during the switch?
- No. A free test migration loads a sample first so you validate counts and stages, then the full cutover carries every deal, contact, and note across before you stop writing to Affinity.