How Dawn Capital automatically manages relationships and keep tabs on the status of deals with Affinity

Introduction

Dawn Capital is an early-stage venture fund founded in August 2006 and based in London, United Kingdom focused on investing in the enterprise software and FinTech sectors.

The firm provides capital and counsel to support founders to scale their business’s growth through talent, products, and business models to become category-defining, global companies. The firm is powered by cloud computing, ever-lowering barriers to entry and multi-player categories - all of which are changing the way people live and work. As this innovation continues, with the growth of AI and no-code applications, the investment opportunities in Dawn’s area of expertise continue to increase. Its portfolio companies include Mimecast, iZettle, Neo Technology, iControl, Showpad, and Gelato Group.

Challenge

Dawn Capital was struggling to manage its deal pipeline and contact information in one system. Tracking information about the firm’s business network across email and calendars was siloed and required manual data entry by the investment teams. This created incomplete entries and inefficiencies in their deal pipeline process, and led to missed business opportunities. 

The Dawn Capital team tried several CRM tools to sync digital communication and found that all competitors lacked the ability to effectively ingest email data and produce reliable and actionable insights.

Solution

Affinity quickly became Dawn's CRM of choice. Affinity enables the Dawn team to seamlessly manage relationships and keep tabs on the status of deals. Affinity’s calendar and mailbox integrations have proven especially valuable in auto-populating its deal pipeline and shortcutting manual input. 

Affinity empowers the Dawn team with fingertip access to the complete relationship history of its portfolio companies, LPs and fellow investors. Team members can immediately pinpoint the status of relationships and determine the last point of contact to ensure that the team stays on the same page.

Dawn is a power user of Affinity’s lists. The team leverages lists to keep track of both its LP network and entrepreneur relationships, enabling it to streamline investment processes and new deal flow.

Results

Affinity has become an integral part of Dawn’s Monday morning investor meetings. Affinity’s pipeline view enables the team to quickly absorb the status of the pipeline and assess the effects of potential investments. Additionally, Affinity’s portfolio view packs a one-two punch, enabling the team to monitor the lifecycle of portfolio companies and pinpoint outstanding tasks that need to be attended to. 

Founded in 2006, Dawn has a deep history of relationships with various partners. Since adopting Affinity, Dawn has been able to unlock these historic relationships and more effectively harness the power of its network.  

“As Dawn looks toward the future, Affinity will continue to serve as a source of relationship truth and action. “I’m very excited to see where the product goes and how it will continue to be our firm’s source of truth for relationships”— Henry Jefferies, Associate

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