Affinity | Proud Partners of WVC:E
It’s the second year Affinity is able to be a part of WVC:E, and I’m delighted to be able to share more about our organisation, our approach to diversity and what motivates us to support WVC:E.
Tell us about Affinity
Affinity is a relationship intelligence platform. Our vision is a world where anyone can cultivate and fully harness their network to succeed. To make this a reality, we’re building a new kind of infrastructure to power all relationship-driven industries and applications.
When you think about it, relationships are one of the few assets that every professional develops over their lives. From students out of college to CEOs of the Fortune 500, few lifetime assets have greater power to change the trajectory of a career or company like a network.
But relationship data is scattered across communication streams, from email and calls to instant messaging and meetings. This data paints the deepest and most powerful picture of our relationships, but almost all of it goes to waste.
Affinity builds the most advanced, high-throughput infrastructure for syncing and understanding data from communication streams and third-party sources. By classifying and learning from this data, we can develop next-generation tools that help professionals find greater success.
Our platform empowers dealmakers in industries like venture capital and private equity to find, manage, and close high-quality deals. By automating the typical ‘data drudgery’ of a CRM, we give dealmakers more of what they really need — time and insight — to source deals, nurture their networks, support their portfolio companies, and raise new funds.
The Affinity platform, including Affinity CRM, is used by more than 2,700 relationship-driven organizations worldwide. Founded in 2014, Affinity is headquartered in San Francisco and backed by leading investors, including Menlo Ventures, Advance Venture Partners, 8VC, and MassMutual Ventures.
What is Affinity’s approach to diversity?
Our team is always thinking about how to improve diversity and inclusion at Affinity. Some initiatives have already been launched, while others are in development as our team conducts the vital work of collecting data to benchmark where we are now to set the right goals.
For the past 18 months, our recruitment team has ensured that at least 40% of the candidates they present to hiring managers come from underrepresented groups. As it applies to gender specifically, in that time we’ve improved gender equity across the company by 75% and our goal is to get as close to 50:50 as we can.
For our current employees, we run an annual emerging leaders bootcamp. Last year, half of the participants were women and we’ve celebrated promotions for 20% of that cohort so far.
When it comes to our community, our customer marketing team’s goal is to showcase a diverse range of VCs from different backgrounds. Some recent highlights of women featuring in this important work include webinars with senior leaders at Buoyant Ventures and MassMutual Ventures, and a blog post on becoming a data-driven dealmaker with input from a variety of VCs.
What motivated Affinity to support WVC:E as a partner?
With a rapidly growing number of customers in the European region, we are excited to become a highly engaged part of the venture capital support ecosystem. We sponsored WVC:E in 2022 and quickly saw the potential and value in supporting this active, thriving community.
Affinity is all about using your network to drive business success. This applies to every professional in the world and, with WVC:E, we can actively support VCs from underrepresented groups to connect with each other, founders, and other people who can support their success.
This partnership gives us the opportunity to be a part of local events and activities, connect communities in ways that support sector-wide growth, and give back to the industry that we care so much about.
How can we get in touch?
For questions or to discuss any of these themes in more detail, please reach out and contact:
- General enquiries: info@affinity.co
- Sales: Request a demo
- Marketing: Uzma Rafiq uzma@affinity.co
We’re excited to see you at WVC:E this year!
