Affinity Release Notes

Key takeaways

• Affinity Ascend went live on July 22 with three agents (Meeting Prep, Warm Intros, Data Update) and four MCP skills callable from Claude or ChatGPT.
• List Search and Filter is now available in both MCP and the API, so agents and integrations can query lists, companies, and people directly instead of pulling everything down first.
• Databricks Data Share entered open beta: self-service, admin-enabled, covering 30+ tables and refreshing every two hours.
• New Lists heads to general availability in a phased, cohort-by-cohort rollout starting in August.

ICYMI: Affinity Ascend is live

If you missed it, here is the short version: Affinity Ascend went live on July 22, and it puts AI to work on the parts of the job that used to eat your morning.

Three agents are now live. Meeting Prep assembles a briefing on the people and companies you are about to meet, so you walk in already knowing the relationship history. Warm Intros traces the shortest path from your firm's network to a target, so you can ask the right colleague for the introduction instead of going in cold. Data Update reads your meeting notes and suggests the field changes they imply, so your CRM stays current without the manual cleanup.

Alongside the agents, Ascend introduced four MCP skills you can call from inside Claude or ChatGPT: Meeting Prep, Warm Intro, Data Migration, and Event Setup. Because they run where your team already works, the relationship context you need shows up in the same window you are already typing in, rather than behind another login.

"Our team already works inside Claude all day, so having our CRM context available immediately in the same interface using Affinity's MCP connector just feels natural. Instead of digging through tabs before a meeting, we can ask Affinity for relationship history and recent interactions directly in Claude." — Joff Redfern, GP, Menlo Ventures

List Search and Filter comes to MCP and the API

Agents are only as fast as the data they can reach, and until now reaching the right records meant grabbing far too many. On the MCP side, an agent had to pull a whole list into memory just to filter it afterward, which burned tokens and fell apart on large lists. On the API side, there was no way to filter lists, companies, or people across global, enrichment, or list-specific fields at all, so pipeline integrations, data-quality audits, and sync jobs were harder to build than they should have been.

Now both surfaces can search and filter lists, companies, and people directly. Filters chain together with AND/OR logic, support a full range of operators across text, date, and number fields, and return results in the sort order you specify. That means an agent can answer a question like "which companies on our dealflow list are in Watching status, owned by me, with no contact logged in 2026" in one targeted query. No more pulling the entire list into memory to sift through it afterward.

The practical payoff is a new class of agent. A data-quality agent can scan a list for empty required fields. A pipeline agent can pull a weekly status summary on a schedule. A productivity agent can surface the specific deals a person owns that match a set of criteria. On the API side, the same capability lets you resolve a person by their LinkedIn URL or trigger an integration only when narrow conditions are met, rather than syncing everything and filtering downstream.

Databricks Data Share, now in open beta

Getting Affinity data into a warehouse used to mean building and babysitting API scripts or middleware, working around schema quirks, rate limits, and performance overhead just to keep the warehouse current. Databricks Data Share removes that tax.

An admin turns it on from Settings > Integrations > Databricks. No engineering project, no pipeline to maintain. The share covers more than 30 tables, including notes, transcripts, interactions, relationship strength scores, and associations, and it refreshes every two hours so your warehouse stays close to live. It also surfaces records that have been deleted from Affinity, which gives your team a clean trail for audit and data-integrity work. With this update, your analysts can point their existing Databricks tooling at Affinity data directly, and spend their time on analysis instead of plumbing.

New Lists just got a whole lot better

New Lists is a ground-up rebuild, not a retrofit. That shows up in ways you notice immediately: faster performance, AND/OR filtering, and an editing model built around how deal teams actually work through a list day to day.

A lot has already shipped since New Lists first opened to firms. You can rename, delete, duplicate, and favorite lists. You can create and manage dropdown, ranked dropdown, and status fields, and reorder or recolor options right from the column header. Removing a record is a single click with one-click undo. A misstep costs you a second, not a confirmation dialog.

This release also adds CSV export and the ability to create entities directly within a list.

Ready to try it? Opt in now from your list settings. If you'd rather wait, your account will move over automatically starting in August. You'll get advance notice before anything changes, and Classic remains available throughout.

How July's releases fit together

Look at the four releases side by side and the shape is clear. Ascend is Affinity’s new agent platform. Databricks Data Share is a bridge to a warehouse your team already runs. List Search and Filter in the API is a foundation your team can build on. New Lists is the workspace where the day-to-day happens. These are four different points of access to one data layer underneath.

That is the point worth holding onto from July: you are not locked into one way of working with your Affinity relationship and deal data. You can let an agent act on it, pipe it into your own systems, or work it directly in a faster interface. The data is the constant; how you reach it is increasingly your call.

FAQ

What is Affinity Ascend?

Ascend is Affinity's AI agent platform. It launched on July 22 with three agents (Meeting Prep, Warm Intros, and Data Update) and five MCP skills (Meeting Prep, Warm Intro, Market Map, Data Migration, and Event Setup) that you can call from Claude or ChatGPT.

What does List Search and Filter do in MCP and the API?

It lets agents and integrations search and filter lists, companies, and people directly, with AND/OR logic, operators across text, date, and number fields, and custom sorting, instead of pulling an entire list down and filtering it afterward.

What is Databricks Data Share?

It is a self-service integration, enabled by an admin from Settings > Integrations > Databricks, that shares more than 30 Affinity tables, including notes, transcripts, interactions, and relationship strength scores, into your Databricks warehouse. It refreshes every two hours and also surfaces deleted records for audit purposes. It is currently in open beta.

When does New Lists become generally available?

New Lists moves to GA in a phased rollout by cohort beginning in August. Each account is notified before its cohort switches, you can opt in early, and reverting to Classic remains an option throughout.

What is not available in New Lists at GA?

Bulk editing, bulk email, inline filtering, inline entity creation, and inline option creation are not part of general availability.

Want the full detail on the agent platform?

Read the Ascend announcement

Relationships have often helped to create an “edge” in private capital.

But that edge stayed trapped in individual heads and inboxes, invisible to the firm the moment it mattered. Affinity was built to close that gap. This conviction has not changed. But everything else has.

Today the company looks different. Affinity is launching Ascend, an agent platform that supports the broad workflows of private capital. This launch is more than a product or platform, but is the launch of a new company, a new Affinity. What was a relationship intelligence platform is now the AI-first private capital CRM.

Affinity started in venture capital and remains the dominant platform in that market. Affinity now serves all of private capital: venture, growth equity, private equity, private credit, and larger multi-strategy asset managers, totaling more than 3,300 firms in all. The platform is built for the deal velocity of venture and scaled for the complexity of private equity.

In recent years, the ground under private capital has shifted. Capital is harder to raise, the best deals are harder to find and win, and strong exits are harder to reach. The edge now belongs to the firms that can leverage their relationships to work at every stage: to find an opportunity, manage it, and carry it to exit.

Affinity enables that transition.

The system of action

Years ago, Affinity got started by automating data entry within a CRM and building each firm's relationship graph.

Today a new automated layer acts on that record, and it has a name: Affinity Ascend. One agent platform across the entire investment lifecycle; fundraising, sourcing, deal qualification, investment committee prep, deal monitoring, portfolio monitoring, and exit. Some agents come out of the box, some a firm builds for itself, and at every stage agents take on specific work: warm intros, drafting outreach, first drafts of IC memos, keeping the record current. Ascend tracks the deals you passed on, why, and what happened next. All of it runs on enterprise-grade privacy and security, which matters more when agents can act on your data.

Affinity has opened the platform. Its intelligence now flows into the tools a team already works in, through fully rewritten, best-in-class open APIs and an MCP server purpose-built for private capital.

Affinity is the best system of record in private capital, and the foundation for a system of action. The record remembers. Ascend acts.

What this means for your firm

Every interaction Affinity captures adds to your firm’s context, and that advantage compounds. The firms with the deepest relationship data win the best deals, and the longer you build on Affinity, the wider your lead.

The platform compounds too. Affinity ships continuously rather than in occasional announcements. The product you bought last spring is not the product you have today, and a promise about intelligence demands nothing less. A system that claims to get smarter has to get smarter every week.

The mission has not moved since day one: make a firm's collective relationship capital usable, so every team can move at the speed of its ambition. Affinity delivers on that mission now, and will only accelerate from here.

The same conviction, a new altitude, and a faster pace. Welcome to Affinity.

How the platform works

Starting today, your investment team can stop building meeting briefs by hand, stop searching through old inboxes to find who holds a relationship, and stop manually updating the CRM after every call. Affinity Ascend handles that work.

Affinity Ascend is the agent platform for private capital, built directly into Affinity. Each agent automates a specific operational workflow behind a deal: preparing for external meetings, mapping warm introductions, and keeping CRM records current. Each draws directly from your firm's proprietary relationship and deal data. As the core of our AI-first private capital CRM, Ascend translates relationship intelligence into action, helping deal teams move faster.

While Ascend is designed to support the entire investment lifecycle—from sourcing and deal qualification to portfolio monitoring and fundraising—this launch focuses on the critical front-end workflows: sourcing, qualification, and pipeline management.

Affinity Ascend works across three distinct interfaces:

• AI Agents: Automated digital workers. Some run autonomously in the background (like Meeting Prep), while others execute on demand (like Warm Intros).
• AI Chat: A natural language interface inside Affinity that allows you to chat with your data and call agents using plain English.
• MCP Skills: Access Affinity’s relationship and deal data directly inside the external LLMs your team already uses, like Claude or ChatGPT.

"Our investment managers run 15 to 25 external meetings a week. Before Ascend, each meeting took 10 to 15 minutes of prep. Now it's a two-minute skim. Across the firm, that's over 70 hours a week back to the team." — Lukas Huber, Product & Tech Manager, Speedinvest

Meeting prep

The agent that gets you ready for every external meeting.

The scramble before a founder or banker meeting is a familiar tax on a deal team’s time. You’re manually digging through old threads, calendar invites, and historical notes to avoid walking in cold.

Meeting Prep automates this entire process. It monitors your calendar and automatically generates a comprehensive briefing document ahead of every external meeting: synthesizing relationship history, active deal context, past touchpoints, and relevant market news with zero manual prompting.

Meeting Prep makes this level of efficiency the default. From associates to managing partners, anyone taking external meetings has institutional context delivered directly to them on day one.

Warm intros

The agent that maps your firm's best path to any target.

The most reliable way into a high-value target is a warm connection your firm already owns. Warm Intros analyzes your organization’s collective network to surface and rank the strongest introduction paths to any company or executive. Once a path is identified, the agent can draft highly personalized outreach copy on demand directly inside AI Chat.

Warm Intros puts that institutional reach one natural language question away. For firms that compete on proprietary access, this agent immediately changes how you source deals.

Data update

The agent that keeps your pipeline clean.

CRMs go stale because busy deal teams stop updating them. Data Update solves this by reviewing meeting notes and automatically proposing field updates, complete with confidence scores, to reflect what actually happened during a call.

While Affinity’s automatic capture already keeps records cleaner than traditional databases, Data Update takes the next step, turning captured activity into structured data changes that a human can approve with a single click. Nothing updates without your explicit sign-off.

The data layer underneath

Everyone has access to AI models, but very few have the clean, structured data required to make those models accurate. An agent pointed at an empty CRM is forced to guess.

Ascend doesn't guess. Every agent draws on Affinity’s foundational relationship record, built from more than a decade of automatically captured activity across more than 3,300 firms.

A competitor can license the same underlying LLM, but they cannot replicate the decade of private capital data required to make that model understand how deal teams actually work. This depth is what allows Ascend agents to operate based on real institutional history rather than generic templates.

Your CRM, native inside Claude and ChatGPT

Traditional CRMs require your team to leave their workflow to input or retrieve data. Ascend runs where your team already works.

Through the Affinity MCP Server, your firm's proprietary relationship and deal data flows securely and directly into external AI environments. Access runs inside each user's existing permissions—the same data they could already see in Affinity, nothing more—and no query bypasses your firm's controls, on-platform or through the MCP server.

• A partner can ask Claude to map the warmest path to a target company and receive a ranked route drawn from your firm's active network.
• An associate can instantly extract a company's relationship history or construct a market map from your proprietary data without ever leaving ChatGPT.

Five MCP skills are available at launch.

Agent skills bring the on-platform agents into the LLM your team already uses: Meeting Prep generates a brief on demand in Claude or ChatGPT, and Warm Intro finds ranked intro paths and drafts outreach.

Workflow skills are standalone starting points your firm adapts to its own process: Market Map builds a competitive landscape from your firm's data, Data Migration assists with data structuring and import, and Event Setup coordinates event-related contact and activity tracking.

What comes next

This launch represents the foundation of Ascend. We’re starting at the top of the funnel, where transaction velocity is fastest and the time saved compounds most rapidly. Additional agents will roll out across the remaining stages of the deal lifecycle, including qualification, portfolio monitoring, and fundraising.

If you’re an active Affinity customer, you’ll also see a preview of Document Synthesis in the platform. This upcoming feature will monitor inbound email folders for pitch decks, teasers, and CIMs, automatically translating them into structured, actionable CRM data.

The true value of an investment team lies in their judgment and relationships, not their administrative bandwidth. Ascend is built to give you the rest of your day back.

Book a walkthrough to see Ascend running on your firm's data.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is Affinity Ascend?

Affinity Ascend is the agent platform for private capital, built directly into Affinity. Each agent automates a specific workflow behind a deal, from building meeting briefs to mapping intro paths and keeping CRM records current, drawing directly on your firm's secure relationship and deal database.

Which agents are available at launch?

Three agents are live today:

1. Meeting Prep: Automatically generates a comprehensive brief before every external meeting.
2. Warm Intros: Analyzes your firm's collective network to surface and rank introduction paths.
3. Data Update: Proposes CRM field updates based on meeting notes for human approval.

Five new skills are available for MCP:

1. Meeting Prep: Run the agent in Claude or ChatGPT
2. Warm Intro: Run the agent in Claude or ChatGPT
3. Market Map: Build a competitive landscape from your firm's data
4. Data Migration: Assist with data structuring and import
5. Event Setup: Coordinate event-related contact and activity tracking

Do I need to configure anything to use Ascend?

No manual setup is required for the core launch agents. Meeting Prep runs automatically in the background and delivers morning briefs directly to your dashboard, while Warm Intros and Data Update are accessible on demand. The MCP skills serve as a custom-fit starting point that your technical teams can adapt to your firm's proprietary workflows.

Does Affinity Ascend work with Claude and ChatGPT?

Yes. Using the Affinity MCP server, your secure relationship and deal data can be accessed directly inside Claude, ChatGPT, or your own proprietary LLMs, allowing your team to run relationship queries in the tools they already use.

Who has access to Affinity Ascend?

Affinity Ascend is included in Scale, Advanced and Enterprise tiers at no additional cost.

How does Affinity keep our data private and secure?

Acting on your data never means loosening control of it.

• Your firm's data stays siloed to your firm, and Affinity never uses it to train AI models.
• Agents and MCP access run inside each user's existing permissions. Ascend surfaces only what that person could already see in Affinity, and nothing bypasses a permission, on-platform or through the MCP server.
• A person reviews and approves every change before it's written. Nothing moves on its own.
• Enrichment draws on public data only.
• Shared data improves only from validated corrections, while your firm's private records stay private.
• If your firm leaves Affinity, we purge your data.

Four AI workflows, four stages of the deal, one idea: AI gets useful the moment it can reach your pipeline, your relationships, and your data.

Here are all four, with the prompts.

Everyone at your firm is already using AI. Most of it happens in a blank chat window that has never seen your pipeline or a single one of your deals. The prompts might be perfect, but the answers come back confident and ungrounded, with no way to tell whether any of it is real.

That's the gap these workflows close. We built four of them with leaders across the deal lifecycle: Grata, Crunchbase, AlphaSense, and Lumonic. Different stages, different data, but the same move underneath.

The move: connect the model to where the work lives

An LLM on its own gives you half an answer. It doesn't know which deals you've won, who at your firm already knows the founder, or what your portfolio reported last quarter. Connecting it through MCP, a standard way to plug a model into the systems you use, changes what it can do. Now it can run a real search, read your CRM, and reason across both.

The strongest version pairs two connectors as a loop. A partner brings the outside picture of live market and company data, and Affinity brings the other half: the relationship and deal context your firm generates just by doing business, captured automatically without anyone logging it. One side tells you what's out there while the other tells you what you already have a path to. That loop is fullest where a partner connects directly to Affinity, as Grata and Crunchbase do, and the whole thing runs in one chat. Where a partner doesn't, its data still complements what Affinity already holds about your firm, informing the same decision from the other side.

To get started with Affinity MCP, follow our step-by-step guide here.

Four workflows, four stages of the deal

Each workflow is self-contained, with the exact prompts. Start wherever your next deal is.

Proprietary dealflow, with Grata: from a one-line thesis to a warm intro

Type one sentence like "I want to take advantage of rising demand for data center builds" and watch it become five searches running in parallel, a ranked read on the sub-verticals, and a filtered list of bootstrapped companies in the states with the most build activity. Then Grata scores each one by seller intent: who's researching a transaction right now, the signal a company is genuinely in market. Grata and Affinity connect directly, so the search results and your firm's relationships live in one place. Affinity checks the list against your collective network, surfaces the one company you already have a warm connection to, and drafts the outreach from the full history of that relationship. Thesis to intro without leaving the chat.

Deal sourcing, with Crunchbase: from a hunch to an investment memo

The obvious sectors are crowded and everyone's fighting over the same names. This workflow goes the other way. It finds the sub-categories heating up before they're obvious, then narrows to the specific companies inside them. One prompt chain takes you from "which B2B SaaS categories are accelerating?" down through micro-industries, to the startups most likely to raise next, to a full investment memo with a built-in bear case, exported as a one-pager you can hand to your committee. Crunchbase and Affinity connect directly, which powers the sharpest part: feed your last twelve months of wins into the search and your own track record becomes the query, grounded in who you already know.

Diligence, with AlphaSense: from a blank prompt to a data-room red-flag list

Diligence has always taken weeks, and most of that time goes to synthesis, not access. This workflow compresses it. A plain-language prompt on an industry returns a sourced market read, every claim traceable back to the document it came from. From there you can generate a committee-ready slide, pull precedent-transaction comps into Excel, and run channel checks across expert transcripts. The newest piece: import an entire virtual data room into a workspace and ask it what you'd otherwise spend days finding: the red flags, the customer-concentration risk, the documents that are missing. Pair that diligence trail with the relationship context in Affinity and you know two things at once: whether the company holds up, and who at your firm can get you in.

Portfolio monitoring, with Lumonic: a portfolio view that isn't a quarter stale

The work doesn't stop at close; it just stops being visible. By Lumonic's count, most private-credit firms still rebuild their portfolio picture by hand in spreadsheets every quarter, which means every decision runs on data that's already out of date. This workflow keeps it current. Lumonic (a PitchBook company) holds what your companies reported; PitchBook holds what the market is doing. Together they build a blended valuation model, flag any company that breaches a covenant or KPI, and stand up a monitor that re-prices positions as conditions move, with every number one click from its source cell for audit. The market side of this loop runs on PitchBook, which Affinity connects with directly, so the data pricing your portfolio is the same picture grounding your next deal.

What every workflow has in common

Four partners, four stages, and the same pattern each time. Every number traced back to a source you could click. Work that used to take weeks came back in minutes. The model surfaced, ranked, and drafted; the judgment stayed with the person. And each one points the same direction: a partner's outside view paired with the deal and relationship history Affinity already holds, so a team works off one current picture instead of four stale tabs, most completely when the two connect directly.

Setting it up

These workflows run in the AI assistant your firm already uses. Across the series the demos spanned Claude, ChatGPT, and the partners' own platforms, with connectors switched on, and setup takes a couple of minutes. To get started with the Affinity MCP, follow our step-by-step guide here.

Where to go from here

Copy the prompts from any of the four workflows above and run one on a live deal this week. When you want the loop built around your own pipeline, book time with our team and we'll set it up for your firm.

FAQ

Is using AI in a chat window enough for deal work?

On its own, an LLM doesn't know your pipeline or who at your firm has already met the founder, so its answers stay generic and hard to trust. Connecting it to your systems is what makes the output specific to your firm and traceable to a source.

How does Affinity fit with tools like Grata, Crunchbase, AlphaSense, and Lumonic?

The partner supplies the outside picture (market, company, or portfolio data), and Affinity supplies the inside picture: the relationship and deal context your firm captures automatically. Grata and Crunchbase connect with Affinity directly; Lumonic's market data comes through PitchBook, which Affinity also connects with. Where a partner connects to Affinity, the two form a loop in which every deal you close makes the next one easier to find; where it doesn't, the partner's data still complements what Affinity holds about your firm.

Which AI model do the workflows use?

No single one. Across the series the demos ran in Claude, ChatGPT, and the partners' own platforms. Because MCP is model-agnostic, these workflows run in whichever AI assistant your firm already uses.

How do you connect a CRM to AI tools like Claude or ChatGPT?

Connect it through an MCP connector in your AI assistant. In Claude, for example, open Settings, go to Connectors, add a custom connector, and paste the CRM's MCP address, then log in as usual. Once connected, the assistant can read your CRM and act on it in plain language, and the same approach works across assistants because MCP is model-agnostic.

Today we’re launching the Affinity MCP Server, bringing your relationship intelligence directly into the AI tools your team already uses. This launch reflects a broader shift we’ve been watching across private capital: firms no longer want a CRM that just stores data. They want one that acts on it. MCP is the first major step in making Affinity accessible through any LLM or AI workflow, turning your CRM from a system of record into a system of action.

Combined with our API Suite, 40+ native integrations, and now with our new MCP, Affinity is the open platform built to fit any firm’s tech stack. Your team gets to choose how they work and your relationship intelligence follows either way. We’re building capabilities that will continue to expand what’s possible. And we’re just getting started.

Your AI tools can now read from—and write back to—your live Affinity data. No tab switching, no exports, and no copy-paste. Just ask a question in Claude, ChatGPT or Gemini, and get an answer from your actual CRM.

"What used to be a 5–10 minute, multi-screen, multi-app workflow after every meeting is now one 30 second natural language request. The Affinity MCP connector lets me ask Claude for a relationship snapshot on any person or company and get it back in plain English. And when a meeting wraps, I just share my raw notes and Claude handles the rest: polished prose, calendar context, and the right entity tags posted directly to Affinity for visibility across my team." — Stephen Lantz, Principle at Bain Capital

To get started with Affinity MCP, follow our step-by-step guide here.

Not just read-only.

Most CRM integrations let you pull data out, but that’s where it ends. If you want to do something with it, you go back to the CRM.

Affinity MCP writes back, so you can close the loop without leaving your AI tool.

Ask your AI tool to create a note on a deal, it shows up in Affinity. No tab switch, no extra step. We’re adding more write operations over time, so what you can do from your AI tool keeps expanding.

“Our team already works inside Claude all day, so having our CRM context available immediately in the same interface using Affinity’s MCP connector just feels natural. Instead of digging through tabs before a meeting, we can ask Affinity for relationship history and recent interactions directly in Claude.” — Joff Redfern, GP at Menlo Ventures

Your AI tools are missing the one dataset that actually matters.

Your team runs Claude for research, ChatGPT for drafts, and Copilot for daily work. But none of them know who your partner had coffee with last month. None of them can map the warm intro path to a target company’s CFO through your LP network. None of them can surface the diligence notes your associate took three deals ago that just became relevant again.

The bottleneck isn’t the AI, it’s the data access. All of that context lives in Affinity. Every email, every meeting, every note, and every relationship score. The full picture of who your firm knows, how well, and what’s happened across every interaction. No other data source has this. Only Affinity has this level of relationship intelligence.

Affinity MCP opens it up. Now your AI tools can start pulling from your live relationship graph, deal data, and interaction history the same day.

What you know has always been your edge, how fast you act on it is what separates you. Now you can do both at scale.

What it does

Affinity MCP translates natural language into Affinity API calls and returns results inside your AI tool. You stay where you are, the data comes to you.

• Search your data.

“Which fintech companies have we met with this year?” “Which lists are we tracking Acme on?” “Healthcare companies with more than 50 employees.” Answers come back from live Affinity data. No filters. No exports.

• Prep for meetings.

“Help me prepare for my meeting with Acme” pulls a structured briefing: deal history, recent notes, relationship context. Everything your firm has captured, ready before you walk in the room. “Summarize the status of deals in our pipeline” gives you the full picture without a spreadsheet.

• Update your CRM from wherever you are.

“Create a note on our open Acme opportunity.” Done. Shows up in Affinity immediately.

How to get started

Affinity MCP requires no local setup and no engineering resources. Anyone with Affinity access can connect in minutes.

1. Connect your AI tool.

Paste the hosted server URL into Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, or Copilot. Full setup guide here.

1. Start asking questions.

Pipeline, relationships, deals. Answers come from live data.

1. Write back when you’re ready.

Create notes, log activity. Changes show up in Affinity right away.

Authentication uses your existing Affinity API key and permissions. What you can see in Affinity, you can query through MCP.

What’s coming next

Affinity MCP is live today. We’re adding more write operations, richer context for AI tools, and tighter integration with the workflows dealmakers and ops teams run daily.

Connect your AI tools to live deal intelligence

Set up in minutes. Start querying your CRM from the tools you already use.

Follow this step-by-step guide to get started with Affinity MCP →

Watch our on-demand webinar to see the MCP in action →

Not a customer yet?

Request a demo →

Every dealmaker has been there: you’re 10 minutes from a founder call, you’ve got Claude open, and you’re asking it to help you prep. The problem is, it has no idea who the company is, what stage the deal is at, or that your colleague had coffee with the CEO last month. So you open another tab, pull up Affinity, copy-paste the relevant context, and start over.

The Affinity MCP Server is built to eliminate that gap. Now in beta, it’s an open-source server using the Model Context Protocol (MCP) that connects Affinity directly to the AI tools your team already uses, including Claude, Gemini, GitHub Copilot, and others. Your relationships, contacts, deal pipeline, notes, and meeting history are accessible right inside your AI workflows, without switching tabs or reconstructing context from scratch.

Why we built this

Dealmakers are increasingly using AI tools for daily workflows like meeting prep, company research, note-taking, and pipeline analysis. But until now, those tools had no visibility into Affinity, which is where your actual deal data lives. That meant either manually transferring information from your CRM into your AI tool, or making decisions based on whatever the AI could infer from public sources alone.

The Affinity MCP Server fixes this by translating natural-language questions into real-time API calls against your live Affinity data. When you ask your AI assistant to help prepare for a meeting, it’s pulling directly from your source of truth.

Most AI tools are like a brilliant research assistant who's never been inside your office. They can tell you everything about a founder from public sources, but they've never read your notes, seen your team's emails with her, or know she's been sitting in your pipeline for six months. The MCP server gives that assistant a full set of keys, so when you ask about a company, they're not guessing from the hallway.

What you can do today

The beta supports 20+ operations across three workflows that cover the moments dealmakers feel the most friction.

Search your CRM conversationally. Instead of navigating list views and filters, ask in plain language:

• “Which fintech companies have we met with this year?”
• “Search for companies in the healthcare industry with more than 50 employees.”
• “What notes did I create last week?”

The answers come back in seconds, directly inside your AI tool, so you stay in the flow of work rather than breaking to look something up.

Prepare for any meeting in seconds. Meeting prep that used to mean 20 minutes across multiple tabs now takes a single prompt:

• “Help me prepare for my meeting with [Portfolio Company]. Give me their deal status, recent notes, and key contacts.”
• “Summarize the status of deals in our pipeline.”

The AI combines what’s in Affinity with publicly available information, so you’re walking into every call with both your internal context and the full external picture.

Update records without leaving your AI tool. Capturing notes after a call is faster when you don’t have to navigate back to Affinity:

• “Create a note attached to our open [Company Name] deal with today’s takeaways.”

Fewer context switches means better data hygiene, since notes actually get written while the meeting is still fresh.

What’s coming next

This is a beta, and the roadmap reflects what we’re hearing from firms actively using it. On deck: field and status updates on list items, call transcript search, relationship scoring, and more advanced write operations. There’s even a built-in /feedback command so you can flag what’s working or missing directly from inside your AI tool. Your input shapes what gets prioritized next.

Get Started

We’re excited to put this in your hands. If you’re ready to bring your relationship data into your AI workflows, book a demo and our team will walk you through what’s possible with AI-powered relationship intelligence.

The future of CRM is conversational. With the Affinity MCP Server, your most important relationships are now just a question away.

What’s different

New Lists are built for speed and flexibility. They handle large datasets without lag, filter across all your data with AND/OR logic, and let you edit records in one click instead of three.

Faster performance

Faster performance

Lists load instantly, even with large datasets. No more staring at loading screens or exporting to Excel because the platform can't keep up.

One-click editing

One-click editing

Updating records is faster. Adding companies to lists is faster. You spend less time clicking through menus and more time working with your data.

Advanced filtering

Advanced filtering

You can now filter with AND/OR logic, use expanded operators, and create filter groups. If you need to find companies that meet multiple criteria across different fields, you can do that in seconds.

This is an opt-in beta. New Lists are live now, and you can try it without committing. If something doesn't work for your workflow yet, you can switch back to Classic Lists anytime.

As we add functionality from Classic Lists to the new experience, you can track progress and upcoming enhancements in our Help Center, where we’ll post updates regularly.

Why we did this

Lists are critical to how firms manage deal flow, track relationships, and organize pipelines. When they don't work well, everything else suffers.

This rebuild is about making sure your tools keep pace with how fast you need to move. You shouldn't have to export data to a spreadsheet to do your job. You shouldn't wait 10 seconds for a list to load. And you definitely shouldn't need to click through five steps to update a single field.

Lukas Huber at Speedinvest said it best:

“The new List experience feels materially more modern and intuitive. The interface is cleaner, the performance is noticeably faster, and being able to filter by connection score is a real step forward in how we qualify opportunities.”

We think you'll agree.

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Try New Lists →

What is Affinity Analytics?

Affinity Analytics is powered by Looker, Google Cloud’s world-class business intelligence and analytics platform. By leveraging their leading reporting capabilities, we were able to focus on creating an analytics solution customized to the markets we serve. Now, Premium and Enterprise tier customers can create fully customizable dashboards and granular, real-time reports directly in Affinity.

Instantly report on the KPIs and goals that matter most to your business. With more in-depth analysis of current and historical data at your fingertips, your team can constantly learn, adapt, and improve your most important outputs.

AFFINITY GUIDE

Relationship intelligence at every venture stage
Download guide

Evaluate and improve pipeline performance

Having clarity around progress toward business initiatives is essential to your team’s success. In fact, 97% of employees and executives believe that a lack of alignment directly–and negatively–impacts outcomes. Real-time analytics not only surface valuable insights but also provide you with a holistic view of your organization’s deal flow, showing you the inflection points at each step in your pipeline.

Increase visibility into initiatives that drive results, and gain the analytical depth and flexibility you need to make quicker data-based decisions. With Affinity Analytics you can evaluate every step of your key processes, create team alignment around best practices, and ensure you're giving the most important opportunities the right time and attention.

Our new analytics and business intelligence capabilities can help you drive value by answering questions like:

• What is the average time that a deal is in each stage of your funnel? Take the time to adjust for challenging bottlenecks.
• Which deals were won, lost, or passed on in a set time period? Benchmark progress, dig into processes, and look back on previous deals to make changes as you go.
• How are deals performing by industry, region, or prospect demographic? Gain insight into successes or shortcomings based on specific KPIs.

Once you’ve had a chance to dive into the underlying dashboard data, it’s time to take action.

Save time and optimize team processes

After connecting with a sample of leading firms, we found that teams were spending a significant amount of time creating and manipulating repetitive reports to support their weekly, monthly, and quarterly reporting needs. Even teams that had an existing reporting process or tool in place were still often exporting data for further analysis.

With Affinity Analytics, you gain a single, end-to-end source of truth, from raw data to custom analyses and visualizations. Create multiple dashboards to seamlessly switch between high-level goal overviews and deep-dives into your most important KPIs.

Now you can do away with having to export and manually manipulate your data to understand the whole picture. Viewing your custom reports in Affinity Analytics means that you can dig into the underlying data, filter or cross-filter by specific data points, and compare current and historical insights–all within Affinity.

We’ve even created dashboard templates for top customer use cases to help you get started quickly, and instantly have access to your most frequently reviewed data points. This automation not only saves time but also creates reliably scalable processes for sharing those data insights with every member of your team–including external partners.

AFFINITY GUIDE

CRM automation: What is an automated CRM?
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Increase team and business partner visibility

Keep your internal team in sync and simplify your weekly reporting efforts with scheduled report sharing. With Affinity Analytics, you can easily schedule reporting dashboards to send directly to team inboxes. That way, everyone is on the same page when it comes to reviewing progress metrics.

You can also export and share them as PDFs, PNGs, and direct view links. If you prefer to export them yourself, you can set recurring reminders, so you never miss sharing a weekly, monthly, or quarterly update.

Internal transparency is vital, but your team members aren’t the only stakeholders that need to understand your business’ performance. External transparency with your investors and advisors is equally important. A key part of effectively managing your investor relationships includes providing consistent updates that cover the data they care about.

AFFINITY WEBINAR

In conversation with Speedinvest: Investor Relations
Watch now

You can work with your LPs to create a dashboard that shows off the data that they want to see. You can tell a consistent story centered on how you’re delivering value, helping your partnerships prosper, and reinforcing your business’ brand reputation.

Affinity Analytics empowers your team to make faster, data-driven decisions. With all of your data and reporting analytics in one source of truth, you can spend your time where it matters most: digging into business trends, improving pipeline execution, and mapping out future growth strategies. Start turning insights into action by leveraging your data to gain your competitive edge.

Want to learn more? Check out Affinity Analytics Masterclass.

AFFINITY WEBINAR

Close more deals with better access to your data
Watch now

Every delay after a pipeline meeting costs deal momentum

During Monday meetings and other pipeline reviews, you and your team make critical decisions about your deals. But long pauses to take action whether it's setting a reminder or sending a follow-up email can interrupt the conversation and slow momentum. Deferring these tasks for later only increases the risk of oversight. To keep deals moving, your team needs a seamless way to take action without disrupting the flow of discussion.

Win the right deals faster with instant actions in Kanban board view

To help teams act faster on the deal decisions made in pipeline meetings, we've introduced a new action bar on kanban cards in board view. This features gives you quick access to four common meeting actions:

• Taking a note
• Setting a reminder
• Uploading a file
• Sending an email

Now, as you review your pipeline, you can instantly take the next step on a deal - helping you increase your deal velocity, avoid missed follow-ups, and outpace the competition in getting to the best deals.

Flexible to fit your workflow

Since teams use kanban views in different ways, we've made the action bar fully configurable. You can enable or disable it for each board in the customize view panel, ensuring it aligns with the board's purpose.

Try it out today and keep your deals moving.

RELATIONSHIP INTELLIGENCE

Improve deal discovery and outreach from your network

AVAILABLE FOR

All Tiers

WORKFLOW TYPE

Pipeline Management

PERSONA TYPE

Operations
Platform

Deal discovery is limited by inaccurate and incomplete relationship information
Deal discovery is often pulled from your firm's existing network, but when duplicate records clutter your CRM, it's harder to trust your CRM data to generate insights and outreach plans that improve deal coverage. Outdated or conflicting information can lead to missed opportunities—like not realizing when a founder you know has started a new company or when a startup you've previously reviewed has recently undergone changes. Over time, these inconsistencies slow down dealmaking and make it harder for teams to rely on their CRM as a source of truth.
Our new duplicate management experience empowers you to keep your relationship and network accurate so your team can confidently access Affinity and connected tools to support deal discovery and outreach.

Beat out the competition by keeping your network data clean and up-to-date
With our latest improvements to our duplicate manager, it’s easier to keep your data accurate and up to date. Confidently merge duplicate records to ensure your CRM and connect tools reflect the latest network, relationship, and deal insights – so you never miss a key connection or opportunity.
Here is what we delivered:

• Intelligent matches for faster cleanup of people records
  Managing duplicates of people in Affinity is now faster and more accurate with Intelligent Match, a new matching method available in the People tab. In addition to the existing “Name Matches” option, Intelligent Match identifies duplicates based on email addresses from over 40 sources – ensuring that variations in email history don’t create duplicate profiles for the same person.

• Merge with confidence using profile previews
  Now, you can see exactly how a merged profile will look before confirming the action. The final profile preview ensures you’re combing records correctly, while a side-by-side comparison highlights key differences between the Primary and Duplicate records – helping you validate your decision before merging.

• Start cleaning up your network data today
  Affinity users that are either Admins or Enterprise Admins can start using these improvements now by navigating to Settings -> Data & Privacy -> Duplicate Management.

What's coming next?
We’re just getting started. Here is what’s next for duplicate management in Spring 2025:

• Intelligent match for organizations - expanding beyond name matching, we will introduce domain-based matching to more effectively identify duplicate organization records.
• Bulk merge duplicates - merge multiple duplicate records at once to speed up data clean up at scale.
• API-powered duplicate management - new API endpoints will allow you to merge duplicates directly within your tech stack.

When insights stay trapped in Slack, teams miss their window to act

Key information about a company, founder, or deal often surfaces in Slack conversations -- but without an easy way to capture it in your CRM, that context risks staying siloed, disconnected from your broader relationships data, and invisible to the rest of the team. This slows decision-making and increases the risk of acting without the full picture.
That's why we've updated our Slack integration to let you create notes for people, organizations, and opportunities -- directly from one of the tools your teams uses every day.

Make better deal decisions by getting all your insights into Affinity

To make it easier to capture and share relationship context in real time, we've added the ability to create notes in Affinity directly from Slack. Your team can now:

• Create a note from any Slack message using the message action menu
• Use the /affinity slash command to start a new note from scratch
• Launch the global shortcut menu (/) to create a note anytime

Notes created in Slack can be edited and linked to people, organization, or opportunity records in Affinity - keeping insights connected and visibile to anyone working the relationship or managing the deal.
With less friction and more complete context, your team can make faster, more informed decisions-- without having to bounce between Slack and Affinity to track down insights or past analysis.

Start capturing insights in Slack to power faster and better informed deal decisions

This feature is available to all Affinity customers on the Advanced and Enterprise plans. If your Slack integration is already set up, no additional configuration is required.
You can download the Affinity App from the Slack Marketplace.

Too much time spent spent searching slows down deal progression

In fast-paced pipeline reviews or pre-call prep, every second counts. But when search results are fragmented across entity types and it takes too long to surface the right context, deal momentum suffers. Delays in discovery create delays in action - and that's time your team can't afford to lose.

That's why we've updated our Search experience to help you access relevant results sooner as well as allow you to move a deal forward, reference vital information, or capture new insights faster than before.

Introducing a smarter, more efficient CRM search experience

We've redesigned CRM search to help you quickly find the most relevant infromation, make better decisions, and push active deals forward:

• Top match tab: The new default view for search results will show you 10 of the most relevant entities that match your query
• Notes in Top matches: Up to five notes that are a keyword match for your query will appear in the Top matches results
• Expandable results: Each tab includes a new See More button, allowing you to load 10 additional results at a time - up to 100 - so you stay in flow without having to do a repeat search

Designed to accelerate decision-making

By delivering more relevant results faster, the improved search experience helps you identify key relationships, recall important context, and take the next best actions - faster than your competition. Explore the updated search experience today.

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

FEATURE

Automatically capture and centralize meeting intelligence in Salesforce

AVAILABLE FOR

Affinity for Salesforce

WORKFLOW TYPE

Collaboration
Deal Management

PERSONA TYPE

Associate
Operations
Partner
Platform

Help center

Meeting insights are the foundation of deals but too often go uncaptured

Dealmakers spend the majority of their time in meetings with founders, portfolio companies, and limited partners—gathering critical information that forms the foundation of investment decisions. Yet capturing and organizing these insights takes time away from what matters most: the deals themselves.

When teams divide their attention between active participation and notetaking, the result is frequently incomplete or poorly structured notes that never make it to Salesforce. Critical information gets fragmented across personal notetaking apps, handwritten notes, or draft emails.

That's why we're introducing Affinity Notetaker for Salesforce—an AI-powered meeting companion that automatically captures comprehensive meeting insights and syncs them directly to Salesforce.

Never lose deal-critical meeting context again

Affinity Notetaker joins your virtual meetings and turns discussions into structured notes with key sections like Highlights and Next Steps—delivered straight to participants' inboxes and automatically synced to Salesforce Account records.

With Affinity Notetaker for Salesforce, your team can:

• Focus completely on conversations instead of splitting attention between participation and documentation
• Eliminate manual notetaking with AI-driven capture of meeting highlights, action items, and complete transcripts
• Access meeting context directly in Salesforce where you already manage relationships and deals, with built-in data privacy safeguards
• Keep your team aligned with meeting summaries delivered to inboxes and accessible within Salesforce Account records
• Maintain consistency across meeting tools with compatibility for Zoom, Google Meet, and Microsoft Teams

Designed specifically for private capital dealmaking

Unlike generic AI notetaking tools, Affinity Notetaker is optimized for private capital terminology and priorities, producing notes that capture what matters most in dealmaking conversations.

The automatic sync to Salesforce ensures that valuable meeting context is immediately available alongside all your relationship data—so you have easy access to the complete picture, even if you need to reference details weeks or months later.

Get started with Affinity Notetaker for Salesforce

Current Affinity for Salesforce customers can enable this feature today by contacting their customer success manager. Getting started is simple—visit our Help Center for detailed setup instructions.

Related releases

• Add images to Notes to keep critical deal data in one place

• Track intermediaries with a new list template built for private equity

• Draft, organize, and share your insights with more clarity and ease

• Cleaning up CRM data shouldn't come at the cost of strategic work

• Interested in learning more?

• Reach out to us and get a personalized demo

AVAILABLE FOR

• All Tiers

WORKFLOW TYPE

• Pipeline Management
• Deal Management

PERSONA TYPE

• Operations

Platform

Intelligence about your network is limited by inaccurate and outdated information

As companies in your network evolve, they often engage with your team from multiple domains or business units. Without proper clean, your CRM can accumulate duplicate records for the same organization: creating confusion, increasing manual effort, and making it harder to act on key changes at that company.

Over time, this can lead to missed opportunities that keep relationships warm and prospective deals on the table -- like failing to reach out after a leadership change or sending a congratulatory note too late after a recent fundraise. Worse, someone on your team might even put the wrong company on your prospective deals list and exclude it from sourcing activities.

That's why we've expanded our deuplicate management experience to help you identify and resolve potential organization-level duplicates, so your CRM stays accurate and ready to power eveyr interaction.

Reduce manual review and improve data accuracy with domain-based matches
We have enhanced the duplicate manager to surface new types of potential duplicates across your organization records:

• NEW - Identical domains: records share the exact same domain
• NEW - Domain redirects: domains from different records redirect to the same location
• Identical name - duplicate records have similar or identical names
  Combined with the profile preview panel, these updates make it easier to quickly identify and confidently validate whether records represent the same organization - before merging them.

Start cleaning up your network data today
Affinity users that are either Admins or Enterprise Admins can start using these improvements now by navigating to Settings -> Data & Privacy -> Duplicate Management.

What's coming next?
Earlier this year we released Intelligent match for people as well as the new preview panel to upgrade, now following our update to organization duplicates here is what you can expect in Summer 2025:

• Bulk merge duplicates - merge multiple duplicate records at once to speed data clean up at scale.
• API-powered duplicate management - new API endpoints will allow you to merge duplicates directly within your tech stack.

Make faster deal decisions with more context in search

In private capital, your first competitive advantage is your network. The second is your speed -- especially when sourcing new opportunities or picking up a live deal. But today, identifying the right person or company in your network can require multiple clicks, searches, or digging into the details of each entity to find what you're looking for.

You need to be sure you're not confusing an LP and a founder who share the same or name or mixing up two similarly named startups. Beyond naming, whenever you hear about a promising startup that fits your fund's investment thesis, you need to be able to see if your firm has already met with them.

Spending time verifying whether you've found the right profile or digging into the details of a relationship can be difference between time spent advancing deals in today's competitive environment and losing them to the competition.
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This is why we created a new search result preview panel - so you can immediately validate you're looking at the right profile and can take action without breaking your workflow.

Our new preview panel lets you see critical context at a glance - directly from your search results. When you hover over a person, organization, list, or note, you will now see a rich preview showing key profile details to help you make quick decisions without sacrificing context.

Here are some key highlights:

• New relationship badges to help you give you context about the warmth of your relationship with them. We've also made these available on profiles. The three new badges are:
  • Never contacted: No logged or synced history with your team
  • Losing touch: No touch points in more than three months
  • Recently contacted: A touch point in the last thirty day
• Relationship context to see the number of notes, connections, reminders, lists, and associated opportunities to verify you're reviewing the correct record
• Last contact details to see the date, time, and participants involved in the most recent meeting, email, call or messages. This section will respect the privacy settings for synced communications.
• Expanded note previews so you can scroll through the text of each note result to identify the most relevant entry before clicking into it.

With the new preview panel, you spend less time looking for the right deal information - and more time advancing the right deals.

The new search result preview panel is available to all Affinity users - no setup required. Just hover a search result to see the preview in action.