In a busy day for deal activity, Canoe Intelligence has announced the completion of a Series A extension funding led by clients Blackstone and Carlyle, Dynamo Software has announced a strategic growth investment from Blackstone, and Affinity has raised $80M to help close deals.
Founded in 2017, Canoe Intelligence is a purpose-built technology platform that eliminates manual data entry for the entire alternative investment ecosystem. Today the company announced the completion of an oversubscribed extension of its Series A financing which was led by Blackstone Innovations Investments and Carlyle, with contribution from the existing investor Hamilton Lane.
From the time Blackstone and Carlyle became clients of Canoe, both have reported significant efficiencies for automating investment workflows, especially where related to data extraction and normalization, data delivery into internal and external reporting systems, as well as document collection.
Says Canoe Intelligence of the extension: “Canoe completed its initial Series A funding round in February 2020 which included investments from multiple participants, many of whom are also strategic partners and advisors, including Hamilton Lane, Nasdaq Ventures, and other alternative investment leaders.
With this additional funding, Canoe plans to continue accelerating the product development of its platform that brings greater ease and efficiency to the management of data used for alternative investment analysis, accounting, and reporting. The company also plans to expand its product suite to include new tools, functionality, and reporting capabilities, and continue to make alternative investment data available to clients in ways that further drive value and bottom-line impact. Finally, Canoe expects to further expand its presence geographically, and grow its leadership team with top-tier product, development, machine learning and data science talent.”
Dynamo Software is an end-to-end investment management platform for alternative asset managers and institutional investors founded in 1998 that announced today its participation in an agreement to provide strategic growth investment from funds currently under management by Blackstone Growth. An existing investor, Francisco Partners will also be reinvesting in the company.
The investment is intended to help Dynamo expand into new global markets and the continued product development will strive to serve fund managers, deal teams, asset owners and allocators plus industry participants involved in the alternative investment landscape. Dynamo’s integrated software offers solutions for front, middle, and back-office challenges, serving over 1,000 clients worldwide. The platform also: “...covers key workflow solutions around customer relationship management (CRM), deal management, portfolio monitoring, investor reporting and accounting and provides value to General Partners (GPs) and Limited Partners (LPs) alike, including private equity and venture capital funds, hedge funds, real estate investment firms, endowments, pensions, and foundations, among others.”
Dynamo’s CEO Hank Boughner said of the investment: “‘This investment from Blackstone – the largest alternative asset manager in the world – validates Dynamo’s position as a leading provider of cloud software to the alternatives sector. We believe with this partnership we can accelerate our product roadmap and further extend and enhance Dynamo’s leading offering across incremental asset classes and significantly expand our customer base.’ “
Affinity, founded in 2014, is a relationship management and intelligence SaaS that retroactively creates a virtual Rolodex of all the companies and people a team has interacted with and updates it in real-time. Today, the company has announced $80 million in Series C funding, which was led by Menlo Ventures and joined by Advance Venture Partners, Pear Ventures, MassMutual Ventures, Sprints Capital, Sway Ventures, Teamworthy, and Brian N. Sheth of ECT Capital Partners. From the time of the company’s founding in 2014, the new funding gives the company a $120 million total in funding.
Based in San Francisco, Affinity is focused on industries such as investment banking, private equity, consulting, venture capital, real estate, and other industries that do not generally use customer relationship management systems or platforms specifically for networking.
Techcrunch says of the software: “Stanford grads Zhou and co-founder Shubham Goel started the company after recognizing that while there was software for transactional relationships, there wasn’t a good option for the relationship journeys.
He cites data that show up to 90% of company profiles and contact information living in traditional CRM systems are incomplete or out of date. This comes as market researcher Gartner reported the global CRM software market grew 12.6% to $69 billion in 2020.”
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