In a sneak peek of our 2025 predictions report, we can reveal that 94% of private capital dealmakers say they plan to use AI in their operations—up 10% from last year. Why? It’s critical to remaining competitive in what is still a sluggish deal environment.
The most innovative firms are combining AI with advanced CRM technology to transform their dealmaking in some surprising ways. To help inspire other VCs, we’re highlighting the winners of the 2024 Dealmaker awards, announced at Campfire. These awards recognize firms that are using relationship intelligence technology to:
- Source and close the best deals
- Design better use cases for their CRM
- Improve collaboration among their staff
Dealmaker award: General Catalyst
Given that General Catalyst just announced a fresh $8 billion fund—targeting early stage startups across sectors in the US, Europe, and India—it’s no surprise they won Best Dealmaker at Campfire this year.
At the heart of their dealmaking efficiency is their sophisticated use of relationship intelligence technology. In August 2024 alone, General Catalyst had some of the highest usage rates of Affinity’s lists, kanban boards, and API, with over 8.6 million calls in August alone.
Integrated across 94 active users, Affinity is essential for connecting the majority of General Catalyst’s staff to massive amounts of deal information—so everyone knows the status of all deals, despite their volume.
To achieve such high internal adoption rates, General Catalyst has focused on:
- Making sure everyone’s Affinity workflow is intuitive
- Connecting Affinity with the other tools in their tech stack
- Including Affinity in their M&A integration motion
General Catalyst has maintained high usage rates even as they’ve acquired multiple firms, each with their own teams, workflows, and technologies. This integrated growth strategy reflects General Catalyst’s intentionality in scaling their use of relationship intelligence, which has paid off in spades.
Innovation award: World Innovation Lab
With multiple investment vehicles in play—including a direct growth fund, fund-of-funds, and single limited partner (LP) funds—World Innovation Lab (WiL) manages a complex network of deal connections and opportunities. And as their fund grew, it was clear they could no longer rely on manual deal sourcing processes and needed to adopt a more programmatic approach so they could scale without adding unnecessary hours of work.
This is why WiL hired Max Eagle, Head of Data, to build their data program from 0 to 1. Whereas only a short time ago, WiL investors were manually entering data into their CRM from Pitchbook and a variety of other sources, now they’re using dynamic social graphs from Affinity’s interaction data that map out their network across their venture ecosystem.
These graphs give WiL a visual understanding of their most important relationships, so the team can speed up decisions about investments, events, and other marketing initiatives that can bring the right stakeholders together.
WiL’s approach also uses extensive automation to help their teams stay informed about deals on a near-constant basis. Automated alerts, reminders, and meeting notes keep deal visibility high and investor productivity optimized, while integrations between Affinity and tools like Slack have improved collaboration among teams across different geographic regions.
For VCs who want to manage more deal volume with less manual labor, WiL is an ideal case study in relationship intelligence innovation within a short period of time.
Relationship intelligence for good award: Endeavor
Endeavor—a leading global community of, by, and for high-impact entrepreneurs—was recognized at Campfire for its dedication to creating positive social impact with investments and community support.
The firms connects entrepreneurs with mentors and peers who have successfully navigated the challenges they’re facing. Their model creates a multiplier effect that inspires high-growth founders to dream bigger. Endeavor Catalyst, a co-investment fund, then supports those founders with capital.
Endeavor’s community model relies on a lot of connections with entrepreneurs who can receive and provide mentorship—2,500 and growing, to be exact. To make those strategic connections possible, the firm uses Affinity for Salesforce to:
- Automate network mapping: With automatic syncing of all employees’ emails, calendars, and contact logs, no potential relationship or warm introduction goes unnoticed because everyone at the firm can see every connection.
- Match entrepreneurs based on enriched data: Affinity’s relationship strength algorithm can automate matching based on companies and contacts that complement each other and know similar people.
- Enrich data while browsing various websites: As employees navigate sites like LinkedIn and startup webpages, the Affinity Chrome extension “reveals the unknown”—such as years of experience, location, last funding round, and investors, mutual connections, relationship strength—directly as they browse.
Endeavor exemplifies what it means to use technology to build community among entrepreneurs—and we can hardly think of a better use case for relationship intelligence than that.
Rising star award: RA Capital
RA Capital, a multi-stage investment manager specializing in healthcare and life sciences, is a rising star in their use of technology to manage deals.
While initially the firm was only using Affinity’s relationship intelligence software for two teams—their investor relations and planetary health teams—they’ve expanded internal adoption across their entire organization of 162 team members.
What fueled this expansion was RA Capital’s integration of Affinity into their existing tech stack, connecting it with tools like Mailchimp, Box, and Slack. The firm also pulls information from Affinity’s API to understand firmwide relationships and activities. This marks a great start in RA Capital’s use of relationship intelligence, which they can now use across all their workflows with the help of integrations.
As they continue to expand their impact, RA Capital stands poised for sustained growth—and we’re proud to scale with them and support the important work they do.
For more on what we learned at Campfire 2024, see our top 10 takeaways from firms like Intel Capital, Kleiner Perkins, MassMutual Ventures, Salesforce Ventures, and others.
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