How Building Ventures turns 8,000 companies into 5 investments with Affinity

Introduction

Building Ventures, a construction and real estate-focused early stage firm, faced several challenges in managing their deal flow and relationships across a small team. Lots of manual work and maintaining consistency among multiple record keepers made things difficult. With Affinity, the firm now has a CRM that centralizes their network, calendar, and inbox data. Affinity’s AI-powered tools also make it easier for the firm to capture and surface relevant information when it’s needed.

With Affinity, Building Ventures can now:

• Standardize and automate how notes are captured across the firm’s meetings with Notetaker
• Search the firm’s records and answer questions within a matter of seconds with Deal Assist
• Efficiently track pipeline and monitor the construction industry alongside the general investment landscape with Affinity Analytics

Challenge

Six employees tracking 8,000+ companies

Building Ventures is a venture capital firm focused on construction and real estate technology startups, investing in early-stage companies at the late seed and Series A stages. As Senior Associate Mayra Soto shares, “our mission is to create a better build world by investing in innovative entrepreneurs changing the ways we design, build, operate and experience our built environment.”

As Soto and the firm’s investment team worked on deploying capital from their second fund of approximately $100 million, they realized they needed a more efficient way to quickly review investment opportunities and make decisions using all available information. “To ensure efficiency, we prioritize transparency across the organization,” says Soto. “This allows every team member to stay informed about market interactions and signals. As a result, we can make swift and informed decisions.”

Furthermore the team needed a tool to ensure this data was easy to digest. Each team member would take their own notes during meetings, resulting in lots of manual work and a potential risk of missing important details.“Due to the large number of interactions that each team member at Building Ventures has on a daily basis, it was becoming increasingly taxing to keep up with all the notes,” Soto says. The investment team needed a better way to capture the information used to evaluate deals.

Solution

An AI-powered CRM that maximizes workflows

Soto shares why Building Ventures chose Affinity as their CRM: “For both challenges, we have been able to leverage Affinity’s new features: Notetaker and Deal Assist.”

Affinity’s AI Notetaker automated what was previously a manual task. “There are a large number of firms we are looking at any given time,” Soto says. “This requires that we stay disciplined with taking notes and aggregating data related to information our team comes across.” 

Besides reducing workload, the notetaker helps the team focus on the meeting taking place instead of having to multitask and summarizes everything with actionable to-dos. “Eliminating the need for post-meeting data processing frees up time that could be used for holding additional meetings, which means more time spent building relationships with founders, LPs, and the rest of our network,” Soto says.

With structured notes from each meeting now automatically added to each prospective company’s record, Affinity is a robust and centralized system of record. But while the firm had already been capturing pitch decks and other relevant company information within Affinity, going through lots of content to answer a simple question could be a tedious process. 

Enter Deal Assist: “Deal Assist has been a great tool for processing information quickly, especially when we are looking into a new deal or need information at hand," says Soto. "It's just faster to ask Deal Assist the question and let it process all notes and decks in order to provide an answer within seconds," says Soto. 

The investment team now gets fast answers to questions and can corroborate the information with the source links Deal Assist provides. 

Reporting efficiently and accurately

In addition to using Deal Assist to help evaluate pipeline, the firm uses the tool to report on progress to their LPs, who they collaborate with closely. With Deal Assist, the team can identify and highlight relevant information that aligns with each LP’s business areas of focus. Soto shares, “prior to each update meeting, we use Deal Assist to surface pertinent information from previous interactions. This way, we can prepare customized information, ensuring that our meetings are productive and focused on their specific interests.”

The firm uses Affinity Analytics to easily track their industry as a whole (known as the built environment). “We query the data we aggregate and are able to share the performance of the built environment when it comes to pipeline, capital raise and deal size,” says Soto. 

This data is also used to compare the industry to the wider investment landscape. “This data, in combination with other sources like Pitchbook, also enables the Building Ventures team to keep track of the performance of the built environment in comparison to the general market.”

Results

Scalability, powered by Affinity’s AI capabilities

With Affinity’s AI-powered tools Notetaker and Deal Assist, Building Ventures efficiently reviews and monitors deals with a lean team of six investors—turning 8,000 companies into 4-5 deals a year. 

With the time saved by automating note-taking and data processing, the firm spends more time focusing on building and nurturing their network.

For those looking to capture the same success as Building Ventures, Soto emphasizes the importance of clear objectives and team alignment. "Having everyone in the team contributing and with a clear process on how the data will be leveraged increases the chances of success of adoption."