Best CRM for VCs/Accelerators to Manage Deals and Investor Databases? (Plus Discount Tips)
I'm looking for recommendations on the best CRM tools for early-stage VCs or accelerators to manage both deal flow (with diligence data) and investor databases. Key priorities are:
- Usability (easy for team members to adopt)
- Pricing (ideally cost-effective or with startup discounts)
I'm currently considering Airtable due to its flexibility, but I'm open to better-suited alternatives — especially tools purpose-built for venture workflows.
Also, any tips on how to negotiate discounts with sales teams when evaluating these platforms would be much appreciated!
Out of 80 VC firms that filled the data on OpenVC:
- Affinity: 39%
- Airtable: 13%
- Saleforce: 9%
- Hubspot: 9%
- Pipedrive: 6%
- Other: the rest
Source
I'm using airtable too - i find it great in terms of flexibility and deployability. But I've tried experimenting with this new tool called TinyDash hand in hand - you can essentially upload any docs to it, and you'll just be able to chat to it to give answers from all those docs.
My team's using it atm as a document management, workspace query-able app. Because we've found that airtable's features are super limited when it comes to AI but also uploading loads of docs per entity is just quite onerous.
Happy to share a link if you'd like
I would keep using Airtable if you're an early stage fund or accelarator. Its the best value for money. Plus, any additional data you need to enrich each company with (ie funding, founder email, business description, etc) you can get by pulling it in via Make.com in connection with API enrichment tools.
Only downside is that it doesnt natively sync to email contact. If thats very important to you, i'd choose Attio. Much cheaper than Affinity - with more or less the same features. Plus their API is much easier to work with.
Agreeed with this -- yeah Attio is also another CRM that I've used in the past. You could explore whether there's a Zapier integration between Airtable and Attio tbf.
I'd put in a comment for affinity here. Definitely beats airtable in my experience from a functionality / useability standpoint. Offers integrations and browser extensions that let you easily plug notes from any website (useful when someone on a call tells you about the 8 deals they're looking at), and has a lot better of dashboarding tools than airtable. I think it's the best for managing the high volume that comes with VC.
But also, I'm not paying the bill.
My fund just went through a bunch of different options to leave Affinity and eventually settled on something called Salesmate. I'm a fan so far.
I used a couple of these usual suspects, the big names. Many were a bit tricky to fully figure out, and not really intuitive. I'm with a small team now, and we're using Pipeline CRM. I would actually describe it exactly as easy to use and cost-efficient, so you can check it out if I'm not too late with the recommendation. It brings all client info - investment goals, notes from past conversations, risk tolerances - into one place. We can track where every client is in the pipeline, and it's really clear who’s ready for more advanced planning or who might benefit from a new product. You can quickly look at how customers are interacting to spot patterns that show what else they might need. That makes cross-selling and upselling much easier, in my opinion; you have a good idea when to offer them another product or service. Oh, and I saw integrations were mentioned - we have Zapier, Google Apps, and Outlook.
We're using Salesmate, but half of the department still doesn't feel fully confident with it. We're looking for an alternative, and I see a couple of good candidates in this thread.
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