New Affinity CRM features: AI, an enhanced API, and introductions reporting

At Affinity, we’re constantly developing new ways to streamline your dealmaking workflows. Our Q1 2024 product release combines artificial intelligence (AI), data, and our knowledge of private capital to help you:

• Accelerate your portfolio support and growth workflows by saving time on repetitive tasks
• Get instant insights on a target company’s competitors for faster and more informed diligence
• Quantify the value of your network with automated reporting

Watch Affinity’s quarterly product release webinar for detailed explanations of these new features or keep reading for the highlights, marked with timestamps so you can dive deeper at key moments.

Our latest AI updates

Affinity Notetaker 

Starts at 1:40

Affinity Notetaker is an AI companion that automates the creation of meeting notes, which is a crucial but often time-consuming aspect of deal management.

The feature uses our extensive knowledge of private capital firms along with their workflows and priorities to produce a concise, error-free summary of your virtual meetings. It sends an email straight to your inbox with the key insights, including:

• The meeting agenda
• Important highlights
• Next steps
• A transcript

These insights are also automatically updated to your Affinity CRM. Affinity Notetaker is compatible with Zoom, Google Meet, and Microsoft Teams, and you can use it in the following way:

1. Invite Affinity Notetaker to specific meetings or to automatically join all meetings. 
2. Set a personalized name for Affinity Notetaker, like “Kunal’s Notetaker,” that will appear as the participant name when joining meetings. 
3. Sit tight! After each meeting, Affinity Notetaker automatically delivers meeting notes straight to your inbox and to all internal participants in the meeting. It also uploads them to your CRM in your Activity Timeline and Notes tab.

With Affinity Notetaker, you can spend your full attention on engaging with meeting participants knowing that structured insights are automatically being captured. 

Industry Insights

Starts at 5:35

Another important but repetitive task that’s part of deal origination and management is researching the industry and competitive landscape of a potential investment opportunity. However, it can take several hours to identify and diligence key competitors across various sources that sometimes yield irrelevant or useless results. 

Industry Insights uses generative AI to provide an instant snapshot of a target company’s competitors—enabling faster and more informed diligence. It provides firmographic, funding, and growth information as well as links to each company’s website and Affinity profile. 

To use Industry Insights:

1. Visit the Affinity profile of a target company and select the Industry Insights module, which is directly above the Activity Timeline. 
2. The module shows an AI-generated list of companies that compete with or sell to the same market as a prospect. 
3. You can create a list of prospects or competitors in Affinity and filter the list based on your evaluation criteria—for instance, filtering out certain investment stages.
4. Pull in information from Industry Insights straight from your browser and inbox as you research companies since Industry Insights is also embedded in Affinity Pathfinder.

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Our latest data and reporting updates

Starts at 8:54

API v2

Our API v2 update is a significant update to the existing API. It provides a more intuitive, reliable, and efficient experience when pulling lists and field data from your Affinity CRM. 

Improved API call capabilities make retrieving data 100x more efficient. This way, you can export the data you need to work in other tools—for instance, retrieving data from a saved view with custom filters so your team can pull more data more often into other tools.  

Introductions Summary Reports

Starts at 13:30

The Introductions Summary Report is an Affinity Analytics report template that allows you to easily quantify the value of your network—so you can show your firm’s impact to current and prospective Limited Partners and Founders or measure your team’s performance. 

With Introductions Summary Reports, Affinity automatically identifies and tracks introductions your firm makes to external contacts from your activity histories, which eliminates overly complex manual tracking while ensuring your records stay accurate and up-to-date. 

Introductions Summary Reports works in the following way: 

1. Affinity automatically identifies and tracks introductions to external contacts via emails made by your team. 
2. Affinity syncs these introductions to your People and Organization records, providing real-time reporting for external and internal performance reports.
3. You can filter Summary views by date, team member, role, and job title and track introductions across your firm, team, or certain team members to better understand performance against internal goals. 
4. You can also see a breakdown of introductions you and your firm have made to specific companies and individuals, which helps you communicate your impact and better understand how you’re allocating resources across your portfolio companies. 

Inferred Connections

Starts at 17:34

Inferred Connections builds upon the automated relationship mapping and scoring in Affinity. It provides a deeper view into your firm’s collective network by showing whether any of your colleagues have shared work history with external companies. 

This can provide more opportunities for warm introductions and building rapport with others—whether you’re doing outreach for a deal, helping with fundraising, or making introductions for your portfolio companies. 

You can find Inferred Connections in the Connections tab next to any company or person you’re viewing in Affinity. Inferred Connections are also available with Affinity Pathfinder, meaning you can surface these insights in your everyday tools as you browse websites and your inbox.

Applying these features to your workflows

Starts at 21:55

Let’s walk through how you can use these features to optimize your workflows and drive portfolio growth.

Affinity Notetaker:

• Use Affinity Notetaker to send meeting notes with key takeaways to your Founders so they can get a head start on actioning the next steps. 

Industry Insights: 

• As you’re in the early stages of a deal or are doing diligence, you can use Industry Insights to easily keep track of changes in the competitive landscape of each of your portfolio companies—checking if any competitors recently entered the space and if there have been any headcount or funding changes with those companies. 
• Bring these insights with you in your next conversation with a Founder for a more well-informed perspective.  
• Pro tip: Pair Industry Insights with Employee Growth Insights to get a more granular view of headcount changes in your portfolio companies’ competitors—looking at how their headcount has changed over a specific time period and by role and seniority.

Introductions Summary Reports: 

• Let your Founders and portfolio companies know the people and organizations that you introduced to them and that have been instrumental to their growth by sharing an Introductions Summary Report. 

To find out how to get the most out of these new Affinity features, watch the full webinar. You’ll learn more about how to:

• Find and manage deals faster with relationship intelligence and AI
• Power the growth of your portfolio companies by sharing your network and insights
• Cut time spent gathering data and make deal decisions faster

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