VC software stack
The VC software stack
Twelve stages of running a fund, in the order you meet them: raising it, sourcing into it, diligencing what you find, closing the paperwork, and then operating the thing for a decade. Each stage links to the guide that ranks that category. For what firms actually run rather than what we recommend, the VC Tech 100 publishes category presence for 100 venture firms, with the vendor names withheld.
Operating order
One stage, one job, one guide
Find the limited partners who might back this fund, and qualify them before the first call.
Editor's pick PitchBook — The gold standard for LP intelligence: the most complete picture of who invests in what, how much they allocate, and who to contact.
Turn the firm's network into tracked deal flow without anyone retyping meeting notes.
Editor's pick Affinity — Relationship intelligence that maps the network automatically and surfaces the warm intro, which is why it is the most widely adopted CRM among established VC firms.
See every deal worth seeing, and keep the relationships that generate the good ones.
Editor's pick Affinity — Passive capture from email and calendar plus referral-network mapping make it the page's top pick for relationship-driven sourcing.
Verify what the company claims before the wire goes out.
Editor's pick Middesk — The fastest and most affordable way to confirm a startup is legally real before wiring money, which the page treats as standard practice on every deal.
Share the deck and the diligence file, and know what the other side actually read.
Editor's pick DocSend — Page-by-page analytics show exactly how investors engage with the materials, which is what makes it this page's top pick for fundraising.
Paper the fund: the LPA, the side letters and the closing mechanics.
Editor's pick Cooley LLP — The highest-volume VC fund formation practice on the page, with LP-side relationships the other firms cannot match.
Run capital calls, distributions and K-1 season without a spreadsheet stack.
Editor's pick Archstone Our product — Our own fund-operations software, and the platform this page ranks first for first-time and emerging GPs: capital calls, LP reporting and fund accounting on published flat pricing.
Keep per-LP capital accounts and LPA waterfalls that survive an audit.
Editor's pick Archstone Our product — Our own product, and the highest-scoring platform on this page's rubric for emerging GPs: capital accounts, LPA-driven waterfalls and capital calls layered on the ledger you already keep.
Keep the equity record for the companies in the portfolio straight through every round.
Editor's pick Pulley — The page's editorial pick from pre-seed to Series B: a free tier to roughly 25 stakeholders, published pricing and the best SAFE and convertible modelling in the set.
Stand up a single-deal vehicle and close it before the allocation disappears.
Editor's pick Archstone Our product — Our own platform, and the one this page ranks first for repeat dealmakers: SPV formation, fund management and the LP portal on a flat subscription with no per-SPV setup fee and no platform carry.
Collect company numbers on a schedule instead of chasing them by email.
Editor's pick Archstone Our product — Our own product, and the platform this page puts first for emerging GPs and lean sponsors: monitoring, LP management and fund accounting on one flat-priced subscription.
Get the quarterly pack and the capital account statements to LPs on time.
Editor's pick Archstone Our product — Our own product, and this page's pick for emerging managers: drafted quarterly reports, a branded LP portal with no per-seat fees, and capital call tracking on published pricing.
The data behind the stack
What 100 venture firms actually run
Data report
The VC Tech 100 →
100 venture firms across ten software categories, one cell per pair, each resolved from a source we fetched and quoted — with per-category adoption counts over the whole panel and a CSV of every observation. Vendor names are withheld: the guides above name the platforms, the Tech 100 publishes the counts.
315 of 1,000 cells carry an observation so far.
Where our own product sits in this stack
VC Beast and Archstone share common ownership. Archstone competes in the fund operations half of this stack — administration, accounting, SPVs, portfolio monitoring and LP reporting — and is named as ours on every stage where it is the pick. Evaluate it against the same requirements and evidence as every other platform on those pages.