How Highland Europe nurtures its portfolio with Affinity

Introduction

Highland Europe, a London/Geneva-based VC firm focusing on consumer and enterprise investments, lacked an integrated tech stack. Employees worked inefficiently across several tools, and had no visibility into their collective network’s interactions.

By integrating Affinity CRM with the rest of its tech stack, Highland Europe successfully created a system of record that is used to make the right introductions, and help support and scale portfolio companies.

With Affinity, Highland Europe has:

• Created a talent network workflow to capture, organize, and share executive profiles with portfolio companies
• Built seamless integrations with Notion, Gatsby, WordPress, and Zapier to automate advisor network updates and manage events and follow-up actions 
• Streamlined KPIs by automating the tracking of activities and portfolio support metrics

Challenge

Fragmented tools with zero integration

VC firms are responsible for helping to effectively manage the portfolio companies they invest in. This often involves decisions about critical hires, corporate strategy, and overall direction—all of which benefit from a holistic approach.

Highland Europe’s philosophy is rooted in the power of what a network can do to help nurture a portfolio company. “A core principle of our firm is the ability to have deep relationships and meaningful connections with the companies that we invest in,” says Abhishek Lahoti, Head of Platform. While the team applied this holistic approach to how they advised portfolio companies, the firm’s tech stack wasn’t set up to scale those actions. "Prior to my joining, our tech stack was really just a hodgepodge of various tools,” Lahoti shares. 

Lahoti joined Highland Europe as its first dedicated Head of Platform in 2023 with the goal of reducing the number of tools employed by various investors and creating a cohesive tech stack. The firm was already using Affinity as a CRM, but it was only integrated with Outlook. This meant important data and interactions continued to live in Slack, Notion, LinkedIn and various other tools and sites, making it harder to have an overview of this critical data. 

As the firm looked to evaluate its tech stack and identify opportunities to integrate tools, there was one other major consideration: low/no-code solutions. “The challenge in VC is that we don’t have product-based teams,” Lahoti shares. “We're not flushed with a CTO's organization filled with a ton of engineers.” Lahoti and the newly formed platform functionality at Highland Europe recognized the need to find the right tools that could make up an easy-to-integrate tech ecosystem.

Solution

A CRM that automatically captures and connects

As Lahoti looked to reassess and rearchitect Highland Europe’s tech stack, he decided that Affinity would be at the center. “When I created this reference architecture, I made it so there was a single source of truth: in this case, it’s Affinity. Any tool that we would pull in needed to have a tie into Affinity.”

The firm had used the CRM to a certain extent, but its primary use case was aimed towards deal and pipeline work, with little consideration of wider network management. Lahoti quickly realized the opportunity to have Affinity be the source of knowledge for more workflows. “The key to this foundation was really, truly a centralized hub of information, in this case, Affinity and all the automations, extensions, and tools had to have some sort of interplay with that.”

With that in mind, Lahoti took advantage of Affinity’s integrative capabilities to connect tools such as Slack, Typeform, Notion, and Google Drive to the CRM. This ensures all of Highland Europe’s network, interactions, and data connect in one single system of record. 

Doing this opened up a new set of opportunities to streamline once-manual processes. For example, team members had been using the event platform Gatsby to manage events while also needing to mark attendance in Affinity. This is all now automated with a global field that’s connected to both platforms. “Someone checking into an event means that we automatically get a label in Affinity to track attendees.” 

This helps to:

• Identify attendees who could be important connections for portfolio companies.
• Notify investment teams if a company they’re interested in was present at an event.
• Report back to firm leadership if LPs were in attendance.

Streamlining a portco’s critical hires

Among the biggest ways a VC firm can offer its portcos support is through the building of a C-suite. “If I can land somebody into a portfolio company, A: it reduces their search time, and B: if there's not already a search firm, it can create quite a big cost saving,” Lahoti shares. 

Highland Europe receives many emails and introductions from prospective executives, but there used to be no way to easily track those individuals, along with their skills, location, and other details that might help establish a match. 

Now, someone at Highland Europe can have a conversation with a potential portco hire, and then send that person a Typeform that captures relevant information beyond what usually appears in a CV or LinkedIn profile—for example where they’d be interested in living, their openness to remote work, and their outside interests and projects. The form gets added to a Notion database, and to an Affinity People List called “Our Talent Network.” This list can be easily accessed by anyone at Highland Europe looking to help match founders with a C-suite hire.

From there a Zapier automation populates the form’s details into a Google Doc, which also gets added to Affinity, and “has formatted the answers from that person's form into an easily readable experience that our portfolio CEOs can look at and really understand who these people are,” Lahoti shares. This information gets shared quarterly in a talent report email to the firm’s broader network.

Supercharging an advisor network

Another major milestone as a portco grows is establishing its board. As part of Highland Europe’s commitment to nurturing the companies they invest in, the firm maintains a rotating advisor network of about 150 individuals who can serve as potential subject matter experts or board members. “What's really important is that our portfolio gets a chance to see who these people are and what they do and filter against that,” Lahoti says. The firm surfaces this through its advisor website, which offers founders a way to request an introduction.

An advisor’s availability can change over time, and those changes need to be reflected on the site. Someone at Highland Europe can update an advisor’s profile and from there, an Affinity webhook connected via Zapier will update the internal advisor network list in Notion and external site, which is Wordpress-hosted. These updates also ensure that no advisor receives too many requests, helping maintain healthy relationships.

Results

A tech stack that streamlines processes and lays the groundwork for the future

Highland Europe’s centralized tech stack maintains accuracy across the board. The change has also resulted in automated workflows and reduced manual tasks, allowing the team to provide a better experience for their portcos and broader network. "Having a single source of truth is super important, and a single source of truth that's extendable is doubly important. The way that Affinity has architected data, especially with API v2, has made things incredibly straightforward. Integrating Affinity is now a requirement for new technologies we consider,” says Lahoti.

In the process of connecting the firm’s tools, Lahoti has established a rubric to better quantify the work the tech stack has done, establishing a number of KPIs. The results? 200+ portfolio activities for the firm’s 40+ portcos in a year. Additionally, the talent network has grown to around 100 executives and the firm has onboarded over 150 advisors.

With Affinity at the center, Lahoti is looking towards the future as the firm and the industry embrace AI-powered technology. "I've created an architecture of data in Affinity that really lays the groundwork for future AI advancements. When we look forward and that 200 [portfolio activities] number is now 2000 activities, we can take that data and layer on some cleverness to it," he says.

Regardless of where Highland Europe goes next with its tech stack, Affinity remains a constant to ensure accuracy and efficiency across the board.