2024 was a challenging year for many in private capital. The industry faced continuing headwinds—from market uncertainty to the lowest distribution levels in over a decade.

Yet many are feeling optimistic about 2025. Central banks are expected to make more interest rate cuts, and in our survey of almost 300 dealmakers worldwide, more than 70% expect to do more deals this year. Only 5% foresee doing fewer deals, down from 11% last year. 

As dealmakers gear up for more activity in the months ahead, what learnings can we take from the year that has just passed? Here are our top highlights to help you start the new year strong.

3 insights from our research-backed reports 

Top firms continue to pull ahead

When it comes to engagement, network growth, and deal flow, top firms continue to outpace everyone else in private capital. Our 2024 investment benchmark report revealed the extent of this divergence, comparing Affinity platform data on 3,000+ firms with the ‘top 20’ list compiled by Dealroom.

For example, top firms saw a major rebound in the last quarter of 2023 with an increase of 69% more deals QoQ. Figures like this indicate the trend towards more established funds for founders and LPs in the midst of an economic downturn, but it is also evidence of their continued commitment to higher engagement with their networks. 

Augie Wilkinson, Director of Portfolio Monitoring & Analysis at Bessemer Venture Partners, spoke to us about his firm’s approach to relationship-driven dealmaking. He says, “We tend to be driven by what we call a kind of roadmap approach. We go deep in sectors or areas that we know very well… that allows our investor team to understand these businesses and really partner with these entrepreneurs or founders, because they know essentially what makes their business tick.”

Bonus: Compare your firm’s activity to others by firm size and region with our benchmarking tool.

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Value creation is top of mind, whether firms are fundraising or not

Half of the dealmakers surveyed for our 2025 private capital predictions report highlighted the significant challenge of proving the value of their existing funds. This figure is up from 30% the year before. For smaller firms competing with larger, more established firms, this can be even more difficult. 

Firms are increasingly cognizant of ongoing key performance indicators (KPI), ways to differentiate their brand, and showing value to prospective founders and limited partners (LPs)—so they’re ready when fundraising picks up again. 

Speaking about how his firm has evolved their tech stack to quantify that value creation, Highland Europe’s Head of Platform, Abhishek Lahoti, shares, “The best way to do this is capture as much data as you can, do some dashboarding, understand what the inflection points are, and then build your KPIs from there.” 

Through Affinity, the platform team can report on the hundreds of activities they undertake each year for their 40+ portfolio companies, which can include introductions to recruiters, business development contacts, or advisors. 

Data, efficiency, and relationships are key to deal sourcing in 2025

For many in private capital, 2024 was the year of network building. This is shifting towards more active deal sourcing, with 50% of dealmakers listing it as their number one priority (up from 30% in 2024).

As mentioned in our 2025 deal sourcing guide, data can help surface opportunities, but organization and centralization are required to scale an otherwise overwhelming amount of sources. 

Affinity creates an automatic system of record, ensuring contacts and data from email activity, calendar invitations, and meetings are added to the CRM and kept up-to-date. Affinity also enriches data with insights from Crunchbase, Clearbit, Dealroom, and Pitchbook—helping to make data-driven decisions easier. 

As firms look to streamline their deal sourcing strategy, many like Future Planet Capital have leaned into integrating multiple data sources that are essential to their sourcing strategy. Head of Origination Peter Mitchell shares that these integrative capabilities have allowed the firm to “now use half a million data points to evaluate companies, and that's going up every day.” 

Future Planet Capital is also exploring automation as a way of minimizing manual data entry and introducing more efficiency to the deal sourcing process. With a standardized deal scoring system and templates for deal sourcing, Mitchell shares, “we can organize a meeting with a founder for any member of our team in six clicks.”

Bonus: Quickly add more automation to your team’s deal sourcing process when you discover top use cases for Affinity’s Automation Builder.

Even with an emphasis on automation, relationships remain an integral aspect of private capital deal sourcing. In a Harvard Business Review study of 900 top investors, more than 30% of deals originated with former colleagues or work acquaintances, 20% through referrals from other investors, and 8% from existing portfolio company referrals. Affinity’s relationship intelligence simplifies network-driven deal sourcing, surfacing the strength of every relationship in a firm’s collective network to help secure the best warm introductions.

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3 perspectives on AI in dealmaking

The shift to outbound deal sourcing necessitates AI

During a webinar featuring Affinity’s co-founder Ray Zhou, OpenAI’s Engineering Manager of ChatGPT Adam Perelman, and Earlybird Ventures’ Partner Andre Retterath, Retterath shared his view on how deal sourcing is changing: 

“Historically, around 70% [of deals] were mostly inbound, driven by a great brand—either firm brand or personal brand of the investor.” But competition has increased—with a 76% increase in the number of funds over the past decade, as discussed in our 2025 deal sourcing guide. 

There has also been a shift from inbound sourcing to firms needing to engage in more outreach. Retterath’s advice for other investors is to “do the homework, desk research, be data-driven, [and reach] out to the most promising founders.” 

He describes how his firm is using AI to do this effectively at scale: “With LLMs, we can suddenly train and integrate our historic email bodies and different response rates. We can have very personalized outreach, and we can see that the response rates are on par with human outreach, but just way more efficient.”

Dealmakers want AI that increases productivity

The way firms use AI has changed over the past year. Whereas a 2023 survey found that 40% of dealmakers were using AI to decide whether or not to invest in a company, the same question asked in 2024 found only 13% still pursuing this use case.

Instead, AI is making the biggest impact on productivity-related tasks. More than three-quarters of our survey respondents now use AI to automate daily tasks, and 64% use it to research companies. These figures are up from 62% and 55%, respectively, last year. 

At Affinity, our philosophy is driven by the belief that AI matters most when it’s employed with the context, knowledge, and workflows that are unique to the industry. 

The Affinity CRM makes it easy for private capital firms to centralize deal data, contact information, engagement history, and meeting notes—providing a shared and trusted system of record. Dealmakers can use Deal Assist, Affinity’s conversational AI, to answer deal-related questions that reference the decks, PDFs, notes, and transcripts stored in the CRM. The result: less time sorting through your inbox and spreadsheets and more time to focus on closing high-quality deals.

Leading firms are consolidating more data to maximize AI

As dealmakers meet with founders, the notes from those sessions can be an important determining factor in whether the firm decides to move forward with an opportunity. But for many, these notes live on desktops and phones, or require manual entry into the CRM. 

Firms like Intel Capital are taking advantage of Affinity’s AI Notetaker to transform this important part of the deal sourcing process, ensuring that notes become part of their centralized system of record to power present and future AI use cases. 

Notetaker automatically joins meetings, transcribes calls, and generates summarized meeting notes and next steps, which are logged in the Affinity CRM. The tool uses our extensive understanding of private capital firms and roles to generate concise, error-free summaries that zero in on what matters most. 

Jen Ard, Managing Director and Head of Investment Operations at Intel Capital explains, “that streamlined process is so nice; it takes notes and automatically uploads them. We just have way more robust reporting and metrics around our firm.” 

Another benefit of using a tool like Notetaker is that it establishes a permanent system of record that doesn’t disappear when a partner leaves. Ard continues, “So many times, investors were not very disciplined about putting notes into Affinity or really tracking why we didn’t move forward with a decision. Notetaker has been a great asset for us to be able to clean that up and just be really diligent about getting notes and information into the system”. 

Strategies for 2025

Many are feeling optimistic about private capital in the year ahead. Firms that can combine powerful AI, a data-driven approach, and a renewed focus on outbound sourcing are well-positioned to see deal flow rise. 

But whether you're an established fund or an emerging player, the key to success lies in embracing new technologies while still nurturing the relationships that have always been at the heart of successful dealmaking. 

Go deeper into 2025 strategies with Techstars and Speedinvest in our 2025 private capital predictions webinar.

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