How LEAP Global Partners makes faster investment decisions with Affinity

Introduction

LEAP Global Partners, an early-stage venture capital firm, faced significant challenges in their investment process. With a growing portfolio and the need to streamline operations, they sought a solution that would improve efficiency, reduce manual work, and use technology to stay ahead in a competitive market. By adopting Affinity's CRM, LEAP Global Partners transformed their investment process. They can now make faster, data-driven decisions and offer enhanced support to portfolio companies.

With Affinity, LEAP Global Partners can:

• Access all relevant company and founder information in one place, eliminating the need to manually search for investment memos, pitch decks, and other important documents
• Conduct twice a week pipeline reviews with the same information available across the investment team
• Reduce the turnaround time needed to provide founders with a decision from a few months to a matter of a few weeks

Challenge

Long pitch decks and long turnaround times

The pitch deck is an integral part of the deal sourcing and management process. Founders capture all the relevant information about their business in one place, which venture firms use to determine if there’s a thesis fit and deal opportunity. This process can take time, and founders may have to wait several weeks before hearing anything from a firm.

Cuco Vega, LEAP Global Partners’ Head of Platform, brought this perspective when he made the transition from being a LEAP portfolio company founder to an employee. “It takes a long time to go from the first meeting to getting that investment, and there are a lot of interactions and moments in between where you, as a founder, are not certain of what's happening.”

Upon joining LEAP, Vega immediately recognized three major areas of opportunity. The first was to define a unique value add and set of differentiators for the firm’s identity. Once they established themselves as a mostly local firm that wanted to partner with local startups, the next two areas of improvement were tied to setting up processes and a technology ecosystem that could support a growing team. 

Vega shares, “we were almost done fundraising for our second fund, which meant we were at this very important growth point, going from being a first fund VC to being a more established VC firm.” As the team looked to invest their second fund, LEAP realized that with leads coming from multiple sources—including demo days, LP referrals, and cold inquiries—there was no established way to evaluate opportunities.

Without a standardized process, the team sometimes skipped steps if a referral came from a “vetted” source, and ended up having founder calls without actually knowing if they were a good fit. “The call would last up to an hour just to realize there wasn’t a match,” Vega says.

Before even getting to that meeting, LEAP had to manually review every pitch deck they received. This could take weeks or even months before getting a meeting on the books since each founder submitted a uniquely formatted deck. 

“This was a very linear process, which meant no step could be done until the previous one was finalized,” Vega shares. As a result, the team couldn’t compile an investment memo until they were almost ready to present to the Investment Committee. “All these weeks and months prior to the Investment Committee meeting, we had this information, but we waited until right before the meeting to start building the most important document of this process.” 

Vega and the LEAP team knew they needed a streamlined process and a corresponding tech stack to source and more quickly close the best deals.

Solution

Eliminating manual work with Affinity

To address the challenges they were facing, LEAP performed a complete overhaul of their existing processes and the technology supporting them. Very quickly they realized that investment steps could occur concurrently, significantly reducing the time from initial contact to investment decision. “The person doing the product review is not the same person doing the market and financial analysis, or the same person taking reference reference calls with clients,” Vega notes. 

By splitting up this process and assigning an accountable person for each step, the team dramatically reduced the time needed to perform due diligence and could focus on setting up technology to support the process. 

While determining what software would power their tech stack, LEAP knew there needed to be one centralized place to manage their pipeline as opportunities advanced and decisions were made. 

The firm had used Airtable as their CRM but they moved over to Affinity because of its integrative capabilities and private capital focus. “Airtable is definitely an amazing tool, but when you want all the capabilities needed for a process like the one we designed, you need a good CRM,” Vega says. “Affinity is not only a good CRM, it’s a specialist CRM. We knew that we didn't have to create any new workflows or workarounds.”

With Affinity, LEAP eliminated the manual effort that had been required to review deals in the past. “Affinity is at the heart of our investment process,” says Vega. “We integrate it with every tool, source of data, and file so our team has everything in one place. No need to search around—everything’s right there in Affinity.”

Affinity, powered by a robust tech stack 

Eliminating the manual work the investment team had to perform when conducting due diligence meant LEAP needed to look at how else they could automate intake and inbound lead creation. The end goal was to have that information live in Affinity.

The first step: standardizing the lead intake process. With Typeform, the team created a form every founder can fill out in less than five minutes. “This is very helpful for both the founder and our team because it standardizes the information that we get from every single company,” says Vega, “which means that now it doesn't matter how we learned about this company, we're going to be able to analyze them the same way we analyze every other company.” 

The team uses ChatGPT’s API to analyze data from each pitch deck and extract the relevant data needed for analysis. The system simultaneously creates a new investment memo in Notion, where all of LEAP’s investment memos live, and creates a folder in Google Drive, which includes the pitch deck and any other relevant documentation moving forward. This information is all fed into Affinity. “The investment memo, the data room, and everything that we received from the application, already gets added to that company's profile in Affinity, and it's automatically added into our pipeline,” Vega shares.

All of this gets created in a matter of minutes.

The investment team now strictly uses Affinity in the deal flow process, including pipeline review meetings twice a week. Affinity’s data enrichment capabilities with Pitchbook, LinkedIn, and Crunchbase provide LEAP with additional insights alongside the investment memo and other information the founders have provided, allowing the team to make quick decisions about potential opportunities.

Results

‍Faster decisions with a full picture 

With automated record creation and a streamlined evaluation process in place, LEAP Global Partners has reduced the time needed to perform due diligence on potential investments from sometimes 3-4 months to a matter of weeks. Thanks to Affinity, the firm can make decisions by looking at one centralized system of record, eliminating the need to search multiple places for relevant information.

“There is a fundamental reason why we picked Affinity, and that is because we wanted our CRM to be the center of all of our information,” says Vega. “We already know that relationship intelligence is key for having Affinity but we also want the operational part of our pipeline to be centralized in Affinity.” 

With investment operations now completely living in the CRM, LEAP can quickly act on deal opportunities using a data-driven approach. This gives them a competitive advantage with an automated tech stack that is built for the future.