Affinity takes total funding to $40.5mn with $26.5mn Series B round

Affinity, one of the fastest-growing and most talked about relationship intelligence platforms, just raised an additional $26.5mn with backing from Advance Venture Partners, Sway Ventures, MassMutual Ventures and Pear Ventures.

Affinity intends to use the new injection of funds to continue building out its platform.

The San Francisco-based company uses a machine-learning, technology approach to relationship management and CRM. I’ve had an opportunity to use the platform myself, and so far I’m very impressed with what they have built.

I intend to put together a more comprehensive overview of the solution once I’ve had more time to experience all the features, but here are some of my initial impressions:

• Setup – the initial setup is really easy, it automatically populates based on your email account and immediately starts plotting relationship maps. I was up and running within minutes.

• Import – the data import wizard is great, mapping fields is simple, and duplicates are dealt with automatically. I noticed very few glitches or issues here.

• Built for PE – the team clearly ‘get’ private equity workflows such as fundraising and deals. There are some powerful inbuild tools here to help manage day to day activity, including a feature which alerts you to emails which require a response or follow-up automatically.

• Built for lazy people – ok, lazy is perhaps not the best word. But we all have all worked with people who loathe CRM and hate to enter details of interactions they have had. I’ve seen people with their own personal spreadsheet (saved locally of course), or even the dreaded ‘human-brain-based-rolodex-combined-with-Outlook-search-function’ approach. Too bad you can’t clone brains when such employees depart!

Affinity is awesome for these people. It pulls data in from emails, automatically tracking relationships over time and helping users to stay on top of tasks. For people that are always on the road and don’t have time to be meticulous with CRM data entry, Affinity offers some great functionality. For example, if I were to receive an email from a new contact at a new firm, Affinity would log that interaction automatically, add a new firm entity on the platform and pull in any data on that entity from external sources to facilitate background research. For firms that struggle to get employees to add these things, this is a compelling feature.

• As mentioned, the system automatically links your contacts with their companies and then pulls in external background data from a number of sources (such as Crunchbase) to provide background information. This is very useful and worked flawlessly for me. That said, I would like to see some additional industry databases available for integration here, especially on the LP side.

• Relationship mapping works well. I’ve seen this kind of technology used before with mixed results, but the Affinity relationship mapping and ranking system is powerful and accurate – so if I want to find a path to talk to a company or individual, the platform will show my how I can get there via relationships I have. The platform even lets you add industry ‘Allies’ which can help to expand your ability to get high quality introductions.

My assessment so far is that Affinity is a powerful platform which offers some compelling functionality. It’s been designed with human nature in mind, pinpointing many of the areas where CRM can fail due to humans failing to update things properly. Seems to me that implementation should be straightforward compared with other CRMs I’ve seen, although I haven’t seen how things would fare for a big organization yet.

Look out for a proper in-depth view in the next few weeks…