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2026 Comparison

Best CRM for Venture Capital: What the Largest Firms Run and What It Costs

For the GP, partner or platform lead choosing the system the firm’s relationships will live in. Published prices only, computed for a 3, 10 and 25 person team, and what the 100 firms in the VC Tech 100 were observed running.

Written by Michael Kaufman · Reviewed against our editorial standards · Updated

Quick Answer

Purpose-built relationship CRMs (Affinity, 4Degrees, DealCloud) suit firms with several investors who source through warm introductions; small funds run Attio, Airtable or HubSpot. At list price a 10-person team pays $23,000 a year for Affinity Scale and $9,480 for Attio Pro. Of the 100 firms in the VC Tech 100, 16 have a CRM we could evidence from a public source.

16 / 100

VC Tech 100 firms with a CRM we could evidence

49 more were checked and named nothing; 35 have not been reviewed yet. Both are counted in the denominator.

Counts of firms, not market share. Method.

Short Answer by Fund Size

Solo GP or Fund I under $50M

Attio Free or Plus, or an Airtable base

Attio's free plan covers up to 3 seats; Plus is $35 a seat a month billed annually, $1,260 a year for three. A relationship-scoring CRM needs colleagues' inboxes to score, so it earns little for one person.

3 to 10 investors

Attio Pro, or Affinity Essential or Scale

Choose on one question: will the team use intro-path scoring every week? If yes, Affinity ($2,000 to $2,300 a seat a year). If not, Attio Pro at $79 a seat a month does the pipeline for less than half the price.

10+ investors with a platform team

Affinity Scale or Advanced; DealCloud or Salesforce if PE-leaning

At this size the network graph is the asset and someone owns the system. Firms raising from many LPs, or running private equity alongside venture, often want fundraising and IR in the same system, which is DealCloud's and Altvia's pitch.

What the Largest VC Firms Actually Use

We checked the 100 venture firms in the VC Tech 100: 16 have a CRM we could evidence from a public source, 49 were checked and named nothing, and 35 have not been reviewed yet.

The count comes from the deal-CRM column of the VC Tech 100, our evidence pass over a fixed panel of 100 venture firms, generated September 21, 2026. “Evidenced” means a public source ties the firm to a CRM: a vendor case study or customer page, a job post naming the tool, or a hosted subdomain. 8 are confirmed (the source names both the firm and the tool) and 8 inferred from a strong indirect signal. “Checked and named nothing” is not “has no CRM”: almost every firm of this size runs one, and most never say which.

We publish the count and not a vendor split. The evidenced sample is small, and naming which firm runs which tool is a disclosure the firm should make, not us. The full method is on the Tech 100 page.

What It Costs for a 3, 10 and 25 Person Team

Annual licence cost at list price on annual billing, computed from each vendor’s published per-seat price. HubSpot Professional includes its required one-time onboarding fee, so the figure is the first year. Vendors that publish no price are listed under the table.

Annual CRM cost at 3, 10 and 25 seats, list price, annual billing.
CRM and planPer seat, as stated3 seats10 seats25 seats
Affinity Essential$2,000 per user per year, billed annually$6,000$20,000$50,000
Affinity Scale$2,300 per user per year, billed annually$6,900$23,000$57,500
Affinity Advanced$2,700 per user per year, billed annually$8,100$27,000$67,500
Attio Plus$35 per user per month billed annually ($44 billed monthly), up to 10 seats$1,260$4,200Caps at 10 seats
Attio Pro$79 per user per month billed annually ($99 billed monthly), unlimited seats$2,844$9,480$23,700
HubSpot Sales Hub StarterStarts at $7 per seat per month with an annual commitment ($20 monthly)$252$840$2,100
HubSpot Sales Hub ProfessionalStarts at $90 per seat per month with an annual commitment ($100 monthly), plus a required $1,500 one-time onboarding fee$4,740$12,300$28,500
Salesforce Pro Suite$100 per user per month, billed annually$3,600$12,000$30,000
Salesforce Financial Services Cloud Sales Core$325 per user per month, billed annually$11,700$39,000$97,500
Airtable Team$20 per user per month, billed annually$720$2,400$6,000
Notion Business$20 per seat per month$720$2,400$6,000

Prices checked October 2, 2026 on each vendor’s own pricing page. HubSpot’s figures are “starts at” prices read from its rendered pricing page. Taxes, add-ons, AI credit top-ups and negotiated discounts are excluded.

No published price

  • 4Degrees: Per user per month, quote only
  • DealCloud (Intapp): Quote only; dealcloud.com/pricing redirects to the product page, which states no price
  • Altvia or Dynamo: Altvia publishes no price and has no pricing page. Dynamo not verified: its site returned 403 to our fetch

Comparison Table

Each cell is what the vendor’s own pages state, checked October 2, 2026. “Not stated” means the pages we read did not say, not that the feature is missing.

CRMs for venture capital compared on build, price, free tier, capture, relationship scoring and integrations.
CRMBuilt forPriceFree tierEmail and calendar captureRelationship scoring and intro pathsData integrationsSource
AffinityPrivate capital deal teamsEssential $2,000, Scale $2,300, Advanced $2,700 per user per year; Enterprise customNoYes, every tier: automatic email and calendar captureRelationship strength score, relationship graph, warm intro path; Scale adds inferred connections beyond direct email historyAdvanced adds Dealroom and Crunchbase enrichment and PitchBook (your own PitchBook subscription required)Vendor page
AttioGeneral CRM with a configurable data modelFree (up to 3 seats); Plus $35, Pro $79 per seat per month billed annually; Enterprise customYes, up to 3 seatsYes, email and calendar sync (1 account per user on Free and Plus, 2 on Pro)Connection strength and strongest connection on every plan, weighted by recency and frequencyCompany enrichment including funding raised; API, webhooks and an MCP server on every planVendor page
4DegreesPrivate markets deal teamsPer user per month, quote onlyNoYes: emails, meetings and shared calendar eventsRelationship strength score and best intro path through the team's shared connectionsOutlook, Google Workspace, HubSpot, LinkedIn via Chrome extension, and a Salesforce integrationVendor page
DealCloud (Intapp)Private capital and advisory firmsQuote only; dealcloud.com/pricing redirects to the product page, which states no priceNoNot stated on the page checkedSold as deal and relationship intelligenceNot stated on the page checkedVendor page
SalesforceGeneral CRM; Financial Services Cloud for financial firmsPro Suite $100, Financial Services Cloud Sales Core $325 per user per month, billed annuallyYes, Free SuiteStarter Suite states automatic syncing of emails, events and contactsNot stated on the pricing pagesNot stated on the pricing pagesVendor page
HubSpotGeneral sales and marketing CRMFree (up to 2 users); Sales Hub Starter from $7, Professional from $90 per seat per month on annual commitmentYes, up to 2 users and 1,000 contactsEmail tracking on the free CRM; automatic logging not described on the page checkedNot statedNot stated on the pages checkedVendor page
Airtable or NotionBuild-your-own databaseAirtable Team $20 per user per month billed annually; Notion Business $20 per seat per month; both have free plansYes, bothNo CRM-style capture; records are entered by hand or by automation you buildNoneWhatever you buildVendor page
Altvia or DynamoPE-leaning fundraising, IR and deal teamsAltvia publishes no price and has no pricing page. Dynamo not verified: its site returned 403 to our fetchNoNot stated on the pages checkedNot stated on the pages checkedAltvia bundles a VDR and LP portalVendor page

The CRMs, Reviewed

Affinity

Published, checked October 2, 2026

Affinity now publishes its prices: Essential $2,000, Scale $2,300, Advanced $2,700 per user per year; Enterprise custom. Every tier includes automatic email and calendar capture and relationship intelligence, which is the product's reason to exist: a strength score for every relationship the firm has, a relationship graph and a warm intro path to a target. Scale adds a notetaker, AI chat, Affinity's Ascend agents, a hosted MCP server and inferred network connections beyond direct email history; Advanced adds Dealroom and Crunchbase enrichment, PitchBook for firms with their own subscription and workflow automations. Scale and Advanced include 100,000 API calls a month. Standard onboarding (data import, field mapping, historical relationship data) is included, and Affinity says most firms are fully live within 60 days. Every plan still routes through "Contact sales" rather than a self-serve checkout.

Who it suits
Firms with several investors who source through warm introductions and will use intro-path scoring every week.
Who should skip it
A solo GP or a two-person Fund I: the per-seat price is several times the alternatives and the scoring needs a network of colleagues to score.

Attio

Published, checked October 2, 2026

Attio's list prices are Free (up to 3 seats); Plus $35, Pro $79 per seat per month billed annually; Enterprise custom. Plus caps at 10 seats, so a 25-person team prices on Pro. Every plan shows connection strength and the strongest connection to a record, which Attio calculates from the recency and frequency of the workspace's emails and meetings. What changes by plan is capacity: 3, 5 or 12 custom objects, 50,000 to 1,000,000 records, 3 to 100 reports, and AI credits of 100, 500 or 1,000 per seat a month plus 250, 1,500 or 10,000 per workspace, shared between AI features and workflows. The API is documented at 100 read and 25 write requests a second. A 14-day Pro trial needs no sales call.

Who it suits
Emerging managers and funds that want to model deals, LPs and co-investors their own way and buy without a sales call.
Who should skip it
Firms whose sourcing depends on multi-hop intro paths through the whole team's network, which Attio does not describe on its pricing page.

4Degrees

Quote only, checked October 2, 2026

4Degrees charges per user per month and asks for a form before it gives a number, so there is no list price to put in the cost table. Its relationship intelligence page states the same core loop as Affinity: it reads how frequently and recently each person has emailed or met a contact, assigns a relationship strength score, and shows the best path through the team's shared connections to someone new. It connects to Outlook, Google Workspace and HubSpot, enriches from LinkedIn through a Chrome extension, and sells a version that runs inside Salesforce. Ask for a quote at your seat count and compare it with the Affinity rows below.

Who it suits
Teams that want Affinity-style scoring and intro paths and are willing to take a quote to compare.
Who should skip it
Anyone who wants a published price before a call; 4Degrees publishes none.

DealCloud (Intapp)

Quote only, checked October 2, 2026

DealCloud is Intapp's platform for private capital and advisory firms, sold as "the AI-powered deal and relationship intelligence platform". The product page lists relationship management, pipeline and deal management, and fundraising and investor relations as modules, which is the main reason a firm picks it over a venture-first CRM: LP fundraising sits in the same system as the deal pipeline. There is no published price; the old pricing URL now redirects to the product page. Budget for an implementation project, not a sign-up.

Who it suits
PE-leaning multi-strategy firms that want CRM, pipeline, fundraising and investor relations in one system and have an operations team to run it.
Who should skip it
A venture fund with fewer than ten investors; nothing about the product is self-serve.

Salesforce

Published, checked October 2, 2026

Salesforce publishes every edition. The sales suites run from a Free Suite and Starter Suite ($25 per user per month) through Pro Suite ($100) to Core, Advanced and Max editions on annual billing. Financial Services Cloud, the industry edition with financial-services data models, starts at $325 per user per month for Sales Core. Neither pricing page describes relationship scoring or intro paths, so a venture firm on Salesforce typically adds a relationship-intelligence layer on top; 4Degrees, for one, sells a version that runs inside it. The licence is the smaller part of the cost: someone has to configure deal stages, LP objects and reports.

Who it suits
Firms that already run Salesforce elsewhere in the business, or that have an administrator to build and maintain a VC data model.
Who should skip it
Any fund without someone whose job includes administering it.

HubSpot

Published, checked October 2, 2026

HubSpot's free CRM covers up to two users and 1,000 contacts with no expiry. Sales Hub Starter starts at $7 a seat a month on an annual commitment ($20 monthly), and Professional at $90 ($100 monthly) with a required $1,500 onboarding fee. It is a sales and marketing CRM built around email tracking, templates and scheduling, and the pages we checked describe no relationship scoring or intro paths. For a fund whose sourcing is mostly outbound or content-led, that is fine; for a warm-intro firm it is the wrong tool.

Who it suits
A fund that also runs a newsletter or LP marketing and wants one tool for contacts and email.
Who should skip it
Firms that need the CRM to tell them who knows a founder; HubSpot does not describe relationship scoring.

Airtable or Notion

Published, checked October 2, 2026

The build-your-own option: a pipeline base in Airtable (Team $20 per user per month billed annually) or a database in Notion (Business $20 per seat per month), both with free plans. Neither is a CRM, so nothing logs itself: every meeting and intro is typed in or piped in by an automation someone maintains. That is the right trade for one person tracking a few hundred companies, and the wrong one the week a second partner starts meeting founders, because the shared memory of who knows whom is exactly what a spreadsheet does not keep.

Who it suits
A solo GP or Fund I with low deal volume that wants a pipeline table it fully controls.
Who should skip it
Any team of three or more that needs to know who last spoke to a founder without asking.

Altvia or Dynamo

Quote only, checked October 2, 2026

Altvia sells a "GP engagement platform for fundraising, IR and deal teams": a CRM, a data room and LP portal, and analytics, aimed at private equity, venture, fund-of-funds and real estate managers who want every LP relationship in one place. It publishes no price. Dynamo Software is the other name buyers put on this shortlist; its site refused our automated fetch on the check date, so nothing about its pricing or features is verified here. Both make sense when capital formation, not sourcing, is the bottleneck.

Who it suits
Firms where LP fundraising and investor relations are as much of the CRM's job as deal flow.
Who should skip it
A venture fund that only needs a deal pipeline.

Affinity vs Attio in Three Sentences

At list price Attio Pro costs $948 a seat a year against $2,300 for Affinity Scale, so a 10-person team pays $9,480 instead of $23,000. Affinity earns the difference with warm intro paths across the whole team’s network, inferred connections beyond direct email history and included onboarding; Attio answers with a configurable data model, a free tier, published API limits and a self-serve checkout. If the team will not use intro-path scoring every week, buy Attio.

Affinity vs Attio, priced at 3, 10 and 25 seats →

Why VC CRMs Fail: Adoption, Not Features

The CRM a firm regrets is rarely the one with the wrong feature list. It is the one half the partners never opened, so the relationship graph covers half the network and nobody trusts it. Five setup steps decide whether that happens.

  1. 1. Connect every inbox and calendar on day one

    Relationship scoring is built from email and meeting history, so a partner who never connects their inbox is invisible to the graph. Exclude newsletters and internal mail before the first sync, not after.

  2. 2. Import the network you already have

    Spreadsheets, the old CRM, the deal tracker: tag each record by source and relationship type and dedupe on the way in. Cleaning duplicates after import costs several times as much.

  3. 3. Build one pipeline with five to seven stages

    Sourced, first meeting, deep dive, partner meeting, term sheet, closed. Resist stage sprawl; a stage nobody moves deals out of is a sign it should not exist.

  4. 4. Make the Monday meeting run from the CRM

    The single most effective adoption rule: if a deal is not in the CRM, it is not discussed. Everything else follows from the partners looking at the same screen.

  5. 5. Add sourcing data last

    Enrichment from Crunchbase, Dealroom or PitchBook helps once the pipeline is used. Before that it fills a database nobody opens.

Spreadsheet to CRM: When It Is Time

Team size. The trigger is the second person meeting founders. One investor can hold the network in their head and a spreadsheet; two cannot see each other’s conversations without a shared, self-logging system.

Deal volume. When follow-ups start slipping or the same company comes in twice through different people without anyone noticing, the spreadsheet has stopped being the record.

LP fundraising. The moment you raise from more than a handful of LPs, you are running a second pipeline. Keep it in the same system as the deals, because the people overlap: founders become LPs and LPs send deals.

Frequently Asked Questions

What CRM do VC firms use?

Purpose-built relationship CRMs (Affinity, 4Degrees, DealCloud) at firms with several investors; Attio, HubSpot, Airtable or Notion at small funds; Salesforce at firms that already run it elsewhere. In the VC Tech 100, 16 of 100 large venture firms have a CRM we could evidence from a public source, 49 were checked and named nothing, and 35 have not been reviewed yet. Most firms do not say which CRM they use, so treat any market-share figure with care.

How much does Affinity cost?

Affinity publishes its prices: Essential $2,000, Scale $2,300 and Advanced $2,700 per user per year, billed annually, with Enterprise priced on request (checked October 2, 2026). A 10-person team on Scale pays $23,000 a year at list price. Standard onboarding is included; you still buy through sales.

Is Attio good for VC?

Yes for most emerging managers. Attio shows connection strength and the strongest connection to a record on every plan, lets you model deals, LPs and co-investors as custom objects, and is self-serve with a free plan for up to 3 seats. Pro is $79 a seat a month billed annually. What it does not describe is Affinity-style warm intro paths through the whole team's network.

Is Salesforce good for venture capital?

Only if someone will administer it. Salesforce publishes every edition, from a Free Suite to Financial Services Cloud at $325 per user per month, but neither pricing page describes relationship scoring or intro paths, so venture firms usually add a relationship layer on top. It fits firms that already run Salesforce elsewhere; for a lean fund the configuration work outweighs the licence.

Can a small fund use HubSpot or Airtable?

Yes. HubSpot's free CRM covers up to two users and 1,000 contacts, and Airtable's Team plan is $20 a user a month billed annually. Both work for a solo GP or a two-person Fund I. Neither logs relationships for you, so the moment a second partner starts meeting founders, the cost of typing everything in starts to exceed the price of a real CRM.

What is the difference between a VC CRM and a sales CRM?

A sales CRM tracks a funnel of leads toward a sale. A VC CRM tracks relationships: who on the team knows a founder or co-investor, how strong that relationship is, and the best path to an introduction, built automatically from email and calendar history. Venture firms also track LPs and portfolio companies in the same system, which a sales funnel was never designed for.

Do I need a CRM for a first fund?

Not on day one. A solo GP tracking a few hundred companies can run on a free CRM plan or a well-built Airtable base. The signals to move are a second investor meeting founders, follow-ups slipping, or losing track of who introduced whom. At that point a free or low-cost seat on a real CRM costs less than the deals a spreadsheet loses.

Sources & References

  1. 1.Affinity: pricing(Essential: $2,000 per user per year, billed annually; Scale: $2,300 per user per year, billed annually; Advanced: $2,700 per user per year, billed annually. Fetched 2026-10-02.)
  2. 2.Attio: pricing(Plus: $35 per user per month billed annually ($44 billed monthly), up to 10 seats; Pro: $79 per user per month billed annually ($99 billed monthly), unlimited seats. Fetched 2026-10-02.)
  3. 3.HubSpot: pricing(Sales Hub Starter: Starts at $7 per seat per month with an annual commitment ($20 monthly); Sales Hub Professional: Starts at $90 per seat per month with an annual commitment ($100 monthly), plus a required $1,500 one-time onboarding fee. Fetched 2026-10-02.)
  4. 4.Salesforce: pricing(Pro Suite: $100 per user per month, billed annually. Fetched 2026-10-02.)
  5. 5.Salesforce: pricing(Financial Services Cloud Sales Core: $325 per user per month, billed annually. Fetched 2026-10-02.)
  6. 6.Airtable: pricing(Team: $20 per user per month, billed annually. Fetched 2026-10-02.)
  7. 7.Notion: pricing(Business: $20 per seat per month. Fetched 2026-10-02.)
  8. 8.4Degrees: product or pricing page(Per user per month, quote only. Checked 2026-10-02.)
  9. 9.DealCloud (Intapp): product or pricing page(Quote only; dealcloud.com/pricing redirects to the product page, which states no price. Checked 2026-10-02.)
  10. 10.Altvia or Dynamo: product or pricing page(Altvia publishes no price and has no pricing page. Dynamo not verified: its site returned 403 to our fetch. Checked 2026-10-02.)
  11. 11.Attio: introduction to communication intelligence(Connection strength weights recency and frequency of communication across workspace members)
  12. 12.Attio developer docs: rate limiting(100 read requests and 25 write requests per second)
  13. 13.4Degrees: relationship intelligence(Email, meeting and calendar analysis; relationship strength score; best intro path; integrations)
  14. 14.HubSpot: free CRM(Free CRM for up to two users and 1,000 contacts, no expiry; email tracking)
  15. 15.VC Beast: the VC Tech 100, deal CRM column(Evidenced CRM count across the panel, generated 2026-09-21)