Affinity announced today the launch of its public waitlist, opening its intelligent network management platform to venture capital, private equity, and other sourcing-heavy firms. Additionally, it announced a $13.5 million capital raise led by 8VC, with participation from Sway Ventures, Pear Ventures, Great Oaks Venture Capital, Western Technology Investment, and angels like Charlie Songhurst.

"For many investment firms, their biggest asset is their collective network - but no one is leveraging that to its full potential," said Ray Zhou, cofounder and CEO. "We're excited to be at the helm of an innovation wave that will really help the financial world fully utilize the relationships they've spent so much time and money building."

For its numerous clients in the financial sector, Affinity's proprietary AI technology unifies, structures, and analyzes millions of data points across emails, calendar events, CRM objects, and third-party data sources. It uses these learnings to maximize 3 value-adds for customers:

-Answering any question about a firm's whole network - questions like "Who introduced us the most deals last quarter?" and "Which of our portfolio CEOs in New York have we not met in 1 month?" can be answered by Affinity in seconds, rather than days or weeks.

-Automating data entry - firms waste hundreds of hours recording when their last contact with a deal was, who introduced it to them, its current financing stage, its location, and more; Affinity computes all of these parameters autonomously.

-Strategically informing users of conversations they unknowingly dropped the ball on, relationships that need their attention, and other network insights.

On top of its rolodex and CRM product, Affinity is actively building integrations with other CRM vendors to bring its AI technology to financial firms of all sizes.

Cofounder Shubham Goel explained, "Answering questions about the health and productivity of professional relationships has been an age-old problem for many businesses around the globe. The advent of data science in the last 5 years has given finally given us the tools to solve that problem."

"Affinity helps 8VC to allocate our firm's resources to what matters most to our business: helping our portfolio companies succeed and engaging effectively with our community," said Joe Lonsdale, founding partner at 8VC and chairman of Affinity. "These breakthroughs to help colleagues and friends leverage the data and people from each others' networks will influence how all firms work in the future."

Affinity's world-class team comprises of the strongest graduates out of institutions like Stanford and Princeton. CTO Adam Perelman graduated in 2015 with the Henry Ford II Scholar Award, holding the highest GPA in the Stanford School of Engineering. The team comes from renowned AI and data science research groups at these institutions, and from companies like Facebook, Palantir, Intuit, and Google.

About Affinity

Affinity (https://affinity.co/) is a intelligent network management platform for managing complex professional relationships and proprietary business pipelines. Using machine learning and natural language science, Affinity empowers investment firms to deeply understand their networks, eliminate manual data entry, and ensure they never again miss an important email. Affinity was founded in November 2014 and is headquartered in San Francisco, California.