As the venture arm of Intel Corporation and the first corporate venture capital firm ever created, Intel Capital faced a challenge: after years of working out of multiple spreadsheets and using a CRM designed for sales teams, how could they manage their deal flow and reporting requirements more effectively?
They turned to Affinity, the CRM built for private capital. Now with a comprehensive system to manage their investment pipeline, here are four ways Intel Capital has transformed their deal management process .
1. Centralize deal flow with Affinity Lists
One of Intel Capital’s biggest challenges was maintaining visibility across their global team of more than 30 investors. Before Affinity, each investor used a different method for capturing deal flow—tracking potential investments across numerous Airtable lists and Excel spreadsheets.
Information was siloed and investors lacked an effective way of monitoring the opportunities in their pipeline.
“I had probably seven different Airtables from seven different investors who all put their info in differently,” says Jen Ard, Managing Director and Head of Investment Operations at Intel Capital. “Investment discussions were just not going well because partners were unable to tell what was in the pipeline.”
Affinity Lists—customizable dashboards that keep track of opportunities, companies, or key contacts—solved this fragmentation by providing a centralized platform where the entire team can monitor potential deals across regions and domains. With Affinity Lists, investors can:
- Surface deeper insights with enriched data: Affinity automatically populates lists with key deal data from trusted third parties like Pitchbook, Crunchbase, and Dealroom—including industry, location, investment stage, and funding history. Investors can manage their deals more effectively with these up-to-date insights.
- Consolidate deal conversations with Commenting: Team members can add or reply to comments directly within Affinity Lists, making it easy to evaluate a live deal or ask questions while ensuring all deal-related conversations are kept together.
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2. Run efficient deal meetings with a kanban view
Intel Capital’s weekly Deal Concept meetings are crucial to their pipeline management, but these sessions were previously held back by fragmented information and manual updates. “Before [Affinity] our pipeline was so murky that we didn't feel like we were really on top of it,” Ard says.
The team needed a solution to capture and surface their deal pipeline in a way that was easy to visualize and simple to update. Affinity’s kanban (or dashboard) view transformed Intel Capital’s deal meetings into productive sessions by providing an intuitive, customizable interface for tracking, reviewing, and updating their deal flow.
The kanban view allows deal teams to:
- Visualize their pipeline in an intuitive format, so investors have a clear view of all opportunities—and their stage—at a glance.
- Filter deals by criteria such as stage, region, deal team, and industry for easy comparison.
- Quickly update deal status by dragging and dropping deals from one stage to the next—from lead to first meeting to diligence and term sheet.
- Access key information like meeting notes with founders or a company’s last funding amount.
This visual approach has improved meeting efficiency for the team and reduced communication barriers. “Within that meeting, we can compare deals and move them around,” Ard says. “That is how we run all of our pipeline meetings now, within all of our domains across Intel Capital.”
3. Preserve institutional knowledge with AI-powered notetaking
Intel Capital has met with thousands of founders over the last three decades to evaluate investment opportunities. Notes from those meetings are important in helping investors make informed decisions, so it’s crucial they’re accurate and comprehensive.
For years, meeting notes were scattered across handwritten pages, desktops, and phones. Information was either decentralized or required time-consuming, manual efforts to transfer into the firm’s CRM.
Affinity’s AI-powered notetaker changed this process overnight. Affinity Notetaker automatically transcribes notes from virtual meetings in a clean, error-free, and standardized format, delivering:
- A complete transcript
- A concise meeting summary
- A clear list of next steps
These notes are automatically stored in Intel Capital’s CRM, giving investors the full context behind opportunities—including the rationale behind decisions to invest or pass on a deal. This ensures that valuable information is accessible even when employees leave the firm.
“All the notes are there, so I can go in and say, ‘No, we didn't miss that deal. We just didn't want to invest because of x, y, z, reason,’” says Ard. “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.”
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4. Standardize LP reporting with enhanced analytics
As a corporate venture capital firm, Intel Capital has unique reporting requirements. Ard notes, “We have to report through the Intel general ledger, and we are a public company, so that means we have some reporting requirements that are really necessary for us to make sure that we manage.”
Affinity Analytics has enabled Intel Capital to meet those needs effectively and share progress on their 250+ portfolio companies through several key features:
- Custom dashboards surface important metrics, like the number of deals won, lost, or passed on in a given timeframe. For example, Affinity worked with Intel Capital to set up a custom dashboard that analyzes time from deal introduction to meeting, helping identify areas for improvement.
- Affinity Notetaker provides the firm with an archive of all investment decisions and their rationales, making it easy to quickly respond to LP questions on topics like deals that were passed on.
- Affinity’s filtering capabilities allow the firm to monitor and report on progress within specific sectors or regions.
“Just being able to report on how many AI companies we've seen, or how many Silicon deals we've looked at—that reporting process has been really, really seamless in Affinity,” Ard notes.
Move deals forward, faster with Affinity
Intel Capital evolved from managing seven custom applications to using Affinity, the CRM built for private capital. This transition streamlined their deal management process, eliminated manual workflows, and significantly increased visibility into their investment pipeline.
Ard notes that the implementation process was extremely efficient; the team integrated Affinity with their existing CRM, Salesforce, within just three months. “It was one of the fastest sales cycles we've ever been through, and we have really not looked back since,” she says.
This decision wasn't just about speed—it was about choosing the right solution for the firm’s specific needs. As Ard explains, “We had a discussion with all of our VC friends and asked who they used [as their CRM]. The clear choice was Affinity; everybody we knew used the system.”
With Affinity, Intel Capital has a comprehensive solution that not only meets their complex reporting requirements but also enhances their ability to identify and act on promising investment opportunities in an increasingly competitive market.
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