How Speedinvest is improving investment decisions and relationship management with Affinity

Introduction‍

Since being founded in 2011, Speedinvest has grown its pan-European presence to over 300 portfolio companies in six sectors. The firm also has additional resources dedicated to funding the next generation of emerging markets startups.

With this growing team, Speedinvest needed a CRM to centralize their deal management process and provide a more holistic way of managing their network of portfolio companies, LPs, and other contacts. They also needed to capture all relevant metrics to make it easier to report on investment opportunities both internally and externally.

Speedinvest uses Affinity as their first point of reference as the platform provides clear data on deal flow across 40+ investment managers —negating the need for as much back and forth via email and messaging. With Affinity, Speedinvest can now:

• Automatically capture accurate pipeline information in a centralized system of record, allowing investment teams to easily track deal progress and saving hours of manual work
• Manage post-investment relationships with portfolio companies and proactively stay engaged
• Use data to identify missed opportunities to help inform future deal sourcing strategies

Challenge

A need to manage investment and post-investment data and relationships

Speedinvest, a European-based VC firm, has a diverse portfolio spanning different sectors with over €1 billion in Assets Under Management. The firm primarily invests in pre-Seed, Seed, and early-stage tech startups in six sectors across Europe. When looking for investment opportunities, the firm is trying to identify as many of those future Series A rounds as possible. “Series A is arguably a first proof of concept that there is something beyond the seed round,” says Lukas Huber, Product & Tech Manager. 

Speedinvest originally used spreadsheets to track their deal flow, but as the firm grew to over 40 people across six investment teams (in addition to a Portfolio Support team and Fundraising team) they realized they needed the functionality of a full CRM.

The firm tried multiple CRMs but found that they were too sales-focused or didn’t offer the holistic support they needed beyond just deal flow management. “We wanted a proper CRM that also goes into people management and lists beyond the deal flow, such as portfolio companies, other VCs, LPs, press contacts, universities, etc.,” says Huber.

Solution

Access to accurate and complete data on demand

Speedinvest turned to Affinity to help manage their deal flow and extensive network of relationships. Affinity allows the team to centralize their investment data in one place, and export it across their tech stack while keeping Affinity as the system of record. “With Affinity, we are able to properly track and process 10,000 opportunities per year, ensuring leads don’t get stuck somewhere in limbo and the right responses are sent to founders or fellow VCs that forwarded those leads,” says Huber.

Affinity’s integrations have also helped eliminate a lot of manual work, allowing the investment team of 40 to focus on analysis and quick decision-making. “We get an application request for an investment,” says Huber, “and then we process leads and send them a decision in 1 to 2 weeks.” 

Speedinvest uses Affinity’s Google Drive integration to upload documents sent by prospective companies, and from there, the integration automatically creates a Google Drive folder if it’s a new company or uploads to the correct folder if it’s an existing company in Speedinvest’s database. 

This saves each investment manager tens of hours a year on manual work, and ensures information on CRM records stays consistent and correct. Huber says, “By having an easy way to upload these documents into your main CRM, it keeps the data accurate.”

The way that Affinity processes the firm’s email and calendar data is also helpful when figuring out the best way to make an introduction. Speedinvest has an Intros Slack channel where people can ask if someone has a contact at a specific company or firm. Before Affinity, Huber says, “it was often hearsay and you had to hope that the right person would look at the Slack channel today and say, ‘ah, wait, I have a connection to that person.’” Now, someone can search the organization in Affinity and quickly pull up the strongest connection. 

This not only comes up pre-investment when looking at startups, but it’s also incredibly useful post-investment when portcos need introductions to the right larger companies or academic institutions. 

Using dashboards to drive decisions and bring a more objective lens to investing

When the firm hired Huber, Speedinvest was looking for operations support across deal flow management, data analytics, and portfolio support. Affinity allows Speedinvest to better track investments over time, with the team primarily using a deal flow list they created in the CRM to manage their pipeline. 

Huber outlines the critical metrics the firm tracks using Affinity: 

• Owners: number of leads per owner, etc.
• Teams: leads per internal team
• Fund: per potential internal fund we would invest into this lead
• Originator: who sourced the lead internally
• Origination Type: where did the lead come from
• Diverse Founders: yes/no, numbers
• Industry

In addition, Speedinvest can pivot and filter lists to show more specific metrics, such as how many leads that make the firm’s “Short List” were sourced by each investment team per quarter. 

Speedinvest also has a dashboard that surfaces missed opportunities, which they analyze by different investment criteria. “By leveraging this dashboard, we were able to find our blind spots in Europe, both on a geographical level and on a sector level, e.g, specific industries we had overlooked or countries we had undervalued,” says Huber.

Speedinvest uses Affinity's dashboards to empower firmwide, data-driven decision-making. With Affinity's robust analytics capabilities, Speedinvest drives more equitable outcomes for their investments, portcos, and investor relations. As Huber shares, "A non-negligible part of VC strategy is actually fed primarily by anecdotes or outdated bias...by using a data-driven approach with the help of the Affinity dashboards we help break or at least mitigate these biases."

Talking to LPs with the full picture during a raise

During their latest fundraise, Speedinvest hired a dedicated team to manage relationships with LPs, as well as another investor-reporting team in charge of filtering data from 300+ portfolio companies to over 600 LPs. Tracking key metrics such as deal flow, portfolio performance, and diversity metrics efficiently was essential, but a challenge as the teams worked across several different offices. 

With Affinity, much of that has been simplified. “If I need to provide an LP with information about our portfolio,” Katharina Porenta, Fundraising Manager, says, “my first point of reference is our Affinity tracker.” With a constant stream of data from 40 investment managers, Porenta and her fundraising team can quickly provide a wealth of information to her LPs without needing to send messages to those IMs. 

“[We] really depend on that information,” Porenta says. “But at the same time, you don't want to bother investment managers too much because they have a lot to do already. You don't want to constantly reach out to them and ask, ‘What about this? What about that?’ Affinity helps us achieve that balance.” 

Speedinvest used Affinity extensively to track their most recent raise. “We’ve input our LP database into Affinity,” Porenta says, “and my team uses it as a CRM platform.”  

Results

High-quality relationships across the firm, regardless of team

“When you have a big network, seeing all the connections in a combined CRM really pays off,” says Huber. With Affinity, Speedinvest now has a way to easily look across their network, ensuring they can make the right introductions from the early deal sourcing stages to helping grow and support their portfolio companies. They can also quickly review their deal flow and analyze data with Affinity’s dashboards, ensuring decisions are made with all the available data. 

With Affinity, Speedinvest has been able to measure the overall increase of startups they see in their deal flow that go on to raise Series A rounds, which has grown from 20% to more than 50% of all Series A startups in Europe in recent years. Huber shares, “we would not be able to see those numbers without a CRM like Affinity and we would also not be able to track this on a macro and a micro level by industry, country, etc.”

Speedinvest could conduct a masterclass on how to manage growing complexity, from their ever-expanding list of portcos and LPs to their large internal team. And despite this supercharged growth, centralized access to information through Affinity means the team can continuously improve their transparent communications and data-driven investment decisions.