How Affinity helps Future Planet Capital book meetings with founders in less than 6 clicks

Introduction

Future Planet Capital is a British VC firm with a focus on investing in companies trying to address the global challenges of the UN Sustainable Development Goals, including climate change, education, health, security, and sustainable growth. With multiple funds investing in multiple companies a year, Future Planet needed a standardized firmwide approach to deal management that didn’t rely on legacy technology.

Affinity centralizes Future Planet’s data and the emails, contacts, and notes of team members to create a system of record. The team is now able to implement a standardized scoring system while evaluating opportunities, and can make decisions with all available data at their fingertips. 

With Affinity at the center of its text stack, Future Planet Capital can now:

• Capture all their data points in one front end-facing CRM, ensuring the investment teams can score companies with over 500,000 available data points
• Increase efficiency through standardized note and email templates, reducing time writing and manually gathering relevant information to communicate with prospective founders and LPs
• Pursue an opportunity and organize a meeting with a founder in six or less clicks, ensuring prompt and proactive communication takes place

Challenge

Multiple teams, multiple tech stacks

Future Planet is a UK-based VC firm with a number of funds focused on both national and global investments that back companies emerging from the world’s top universities and research ecosystems. 

Finding great opportunities across the globe and turning those into actual investments requires an enormous amount of sourcing and due diligence. Before Affinity, Future Planet’s multiple investment teams were all using their own methods of deal sourcing and decision making. 

Most of the analysis was being done in separate Excel spreadsheets and the Google Suite. “Lots of the stuff that was being done in Google Sheets was very good and very novel, but not particularly scalable,” says Peter Mitchell, Head of Origination at the firm. Additionally, each team had their communication method of choice, including WhatsApp and email, and notes were scattered across various apps. “Lots of different notes on deals and opinions of CEOs and such were often organized either in Notes or Word, which were hard to access and very hard to share across the whole company.” 

The firm managed hundreds of opportunities in an ever-growing pipeline, but as Mitchell shares, they were “struggling to keep these in an up-to-date fashion and accessible way that everyone could get.” Future Planet realized they needed a CRM that could serve as a system of record and capture all’ notes, communications, and relationships in one place to  reduce friction in their investment process and enable faster decision making.

Solution

A data-driven investment approach available to all

When Mitchell joined Future Planet, he was tasked with creating a scoring system to evaluate companies. “We had about 500 companies in our pipeline and [while] radically expanding that number, we were struggling to keep these in an up-to-date fashion and accessible way that everyone could get.” 

The first version of this scoring system involved pushing data from Crunchbase and Tracxn into Python, then uploading it into Google Sheets and Excel. Ultimately, however, things kept breaking as they tried to do more complex formulas and push data to multiple locations. “At that point, once the scoring system was broadly there, we decided that it was time to bite the bullet and, and sign up for an all-singing or dancing CRM.”

Enter Affinity: “Affinity has allowed us to turn information and data more easily into action,” says Mitchell. “All of our insights are in the same place, where people can move around through the creation of lists, templates, views, etc.”

By moving the data system into Affinity, Future Planet Capital provides users with easy access to the firm’s data—and paves the way for more capabilities around creating bespoke ways to surface data.“We had this main juggernaut of the scoring system and a front end that more and more people could engage with,” says Mitchell. “But we also had the side projects that were very easy to present to people in very similar formats that they were used to, which allowed the system to scale and our general work to broaden.”

For example, one of the UK-focused funds requires the team to look at Beauhurst, a UK provider of data on hybrid companies. Now, they can “merge the Beauhurst data with LinkedIn, and process that data using Python and load it onto Affinity.”

Increased efficiency with the same proactive, personalized interactions

In addition to capturing all relevant information in a centralized system of record, Future Planet looked to where they could gain efficiency as they built out their new tech stack. “We were very diligent about mapping out how each of us are spending our time identifying where that time is unnecessary or unproductive,” Mitchell shares, “then being very purposeful in trying to find solutions that reduce that time.”

One of the most time-consuming efforts? Sending emails to founders that feel hyper-personalized and provide examples and guidance for future pitches. When it comes to these emails, Mitchell says, “what most entrepreneurs wanted was three or four bullet points about the things that they did well, and the things that they could improve on.” With a few Typeform and Google Form integrations powered by Zapier, Affinity “allows us to have inbounds coming to a single place with easy email templates that immediately respond to them if they're in thesis, or politely reject them or cancel our engagement if they don't.”

Affinity has also helped the Future Planet team with their LP management process. Based on the theory of Dunbar's number that states humans can only really maintain about 120 warm relationships, the firm set about creating their own Dunbar list of their top clients and prospects. Mitchell adds, “we then built on top of that analytics dashboard to ensure that people that are on that list have regular contact [with the firm], with highlighted dormant accounts and push reminders for people that need to meet their respective clients, LPs, etc.”

Future Planet also has a database of about 8,000 co-investors in Affinity who are scored by their estimated historical performance. Investment teams can filter the list to identify the right potential investors when filling out a raise for their portfolio companies, and in turn identify the right team member to make the introduction. Mitchell shares, “if you do identify a co-investor that is perfect for an opportunity, Affinity is great at identifying who you need to reach out to on the team that can give you the warm intro.”

Results

Decisions backed by half a million data points

Since implementing Affinity as part of a data-driven investment approach, Future Planet has grown to over $400 million assets under management (AUM) and experienced a near fourfold increase in their pipeline. With Affinity at the center of a tech stack adopted across the firm, Mitchell shares that the investment teams “now use half a million data points to evaluate companies, and that's going up every day.”

In addition to making decisions with all available data points, historical context, and firmwide information available, Affinity’s integrative capabilities have helped the firm act faster. “One example of efficiency gains is that we now can organize a meeting with a founder for any member of our team in six clicks,” Mitchell says. “And that's a maximum of six clicks. Depending on how it's structured, it can come down to four.”

As Future Capital continues to grow their pipeline and overall efficiency, Affinity serves as their centralized investment interface that’s accessible to all. Mitchell says, “Finally, there's a home for all of these bespoke pipeline expansion projects, and all of which broadly follow the same three steps, which is; find some data, process it, and present it in Affinity.”