Attio for VC

Four mismatches, and every one of them shows up as a number nobody trusts.

• A deal is not a sale. A B2B sales deal closes in weeks with a purchase order; a venture deal closes in months with a term sheet, a partner vote, a lead-investor handshake and a legal close. The default pipeline forces you to pretend a partnership vote is a proposal and a term sheet is a contract.
• A company is not a contact database. A portfolio company has a cap-table position, a board seat, a valuation history, a follow-on plan and a stage in the fund lifecycle. A standard company record holds a name, a domain and a few tags, so everything the GP actually tracks ends up in a Google Doc.
• LPs are their own universe. They have capital commitments, capital calls, distribution history, reporting preferences and a relationship cadence. Treat them as contacts and you collapse two books of business into one and lose sight of both.
• Co-investors and networks matter. A fund runs on relationships with other funds, angels, operators and scouts who refer deals and follow on in rounds. A flat contact list cannot map who sends you the best deals or who you owe an intro to.

• Companies — the universe. Startups sourced, passed, invested in. Split by relationship type (Sourced, Evaluating, Portfolio, Passed, Alumni) with stage of business, last-round valuation, current ARR, category and a link to the most recent deck.
• Deals — active opportunities, one per check rather than one per company, so a Series B follow-on is a new deal. Round size, allocation requested and received, pre-money valuation, lead status, partner champion, partner vote status.
• Portfolio companies — a custom object created when a Deal closes Won. Cap-table position, initial check, total invested, board and observer seats, board-meeting cadence, next reporting date, links to the quarterly updates. Separate from Companies because the workflows differ: sourcing cares about filters, portfolio cares about status health and follow-on planning.
• LPs — a custom object with commitment size, commitments to prior funds, capital called, distributions paid, preferred reporting cadence and next interaction due. Not every fund needs it on day one; it becomes load-bearing fast.
• People — founders, co-investors, LPs, angels, scouts and operators, with role in the ecosystem, warm-intro strength, last partner conversation and intro source. One record that links out to Companies, Deals, Portfolio companies or LPs depending on context.

Attio handles this with the Deals object plus a status field for the partner vote, a link to the decision memo, and a relationship back to whoever brought the deal in. Every deal has a partner owner and a champion. Pass reasons are a multi-select rather than free text, so pass patterns are analysable later.

• Sourced — inbound intro, event, cold email, scout tip or portfolio-founder referral. Gets a partner owner within 48 hours.
• Screened — first partner meeting. Screen pass, or proceed.
• Evaluating — second meeting, often with another partner. Preliminary memo drafted.
• Diligence — references, market work, founder deep-dive. Memo finalised.
• Partner vote — investment committee. Term sheet, wait, or pass.
• Term sheet signed — negotiation on details, lead-investor role confirmed.
• Closed / Invested — wire sent, portfolio company record created.
• Passed — reason logged, record kept for follow-the-founder tracking.

Every fund wants the same sourcing list and never quite builds it, because nobody has the time. In Attio it compounds instead.

• Inbound intros into a People record: an email to the firm mailbox triggers a workflow that checks for an existing record, creates one if missing, and tags the source as Inbound Email.
• Event-based sourcing: a conference CSV imports in minutes flagged Source Event, and founders missing from your network become a single view to work through the following week.
• Scout deal flow: scouts submit through a form or an email alias, and a workflow creates the company and deal, routes it to the right partner by stage or category, and notifies the Slack channel.
• Founder follow-up reminders: a pass reason of Too Early creates a task six months out, so no deal is lost to timing.

Funds often bolt on a separate portfolio tool. For seed and early-stage funds, Attio covers what most portcos actually report: revenue, runway, headcount, next raise timing, key risks, key wins. The Portfolio Company record holds the current-quarter numbers, a quarterly update is a note or a linked email, and a dashboard surfaces the portcos that missed their last update, the ones short on runway, and the ones hitting follow-on thresholds. For deeper metrics the record integrates with a dedicated tool or a sheet, while the relationship data and the follow-on pipeline stay in Attio.

A fund that ignores LP relations between fundraises pays for it in the next one. LPs get their own pipeline: the LP object with commitment, cadence and next-touch date; a scheduled workflow that surfaces any LP with no interaction in 90 days into the partner's Monday view; capital call and distribution dates as structured fields rather than spreadsheet rows; and a separate fundraise pipeline when the next fund kicks off, pre-populated with existing LPs. None of it is clever. It is structure replacing a partner's memory.

Two dashboards do most of the work. The partner Monday view shows pipeline by stage, deals waiting on partner action, portfolio companies that missed an update, and LPs overdue a touch — five minutes and the week starts. The fund-level dashboard shows deals sourced against evaluated against invested by quarter, pass reasons by category, portfolio health by status, and follow-on pipeline against reserve. That is the one the managing partner shows the LPAC.

• New inbound email creates or updates a Person and Company record, deduplicated on email, so there are never two records for the same founder.
• A deal stage change updates the partner owner and opens a thread in the IC Slack channel with the memo link.
• Closed-Won creates a Portfolio Company record with inherited fields, board cadence defaulting from the check size. No copy-paste.
• A quarterly update reminder puts a task on every portfolio company at its reporting cadence, and missed updates bubble up to the GP dashboard.
• An LP quarterly-letter send list: a view filtered by cadence preference, one click to export or pipe into a mail tool.
• A co-investor relationship decay flag surfaces anyone with no interaction in 180 days for a coffee intro.

The bar for a fund CRM is high, because partners will not use a tool that costs them more than it gives. A venture setup takes about 7 to 10 working days once the fund has decided on the custom objects and the pipeline stages. The blocker is rarely the tool — it is the partnership agreeing what a deal-stage definition means.

• Custom objects are first-class. Portfolio companies and LPs are not awkward extensions of Deals or Contacts; they have their own workflows, views and automations.
• Relationships are real. One person links to multiple companies across sourced, portfolio and co-investor contexts, rather than being forced through duplicate contact records.
• Speed and focus. A partner on the road opens Attio on mobile, updates a deal in 20 seconds, adds a note and closes the tab.