Affinity, a San Francisco, California-based relationship intelligence platform, has raised $26.5 million in Series B funding to support its mission of building a platform that structures the world’s communication data to harness professional relationships. This round of funding was led by Advance Venture Partners and Sway Ventures. MassMutual Ventures, Pear Ventures, and several angel investors participated in this round including SuccessFactors founder and former CEO Lars Dalgaard. Including this round, Affinity has raised $40.5 million in total funding.
Some of the largest industries in the world including financial services, real estate, and technology use universal tools like email and calendars — which creates trillions of data bytes every day. These communication streams contain the majority of the world’s relationship information, but it sits unused and unstructured in disparate data silos.
“Affinity is changing the relationship management industry by leveraging data in ways no one thought possible,” said Affinity co-founder and CEO Ray Zhou. “Our goal is to create a world in which anyone can tap into the full power of their network to start a company, land a dream job, close a huge deal or otherwise find great opportunities for business success. We’re building the technology infrastructure that will make that possible for everyone.”
Companies spend over $40 billion per year on relationship management and professional networking systems, but have to still deal with problems related to manual data entry. So Affinity built a data platform that small and large enterprises can use for analyzing and synthesizing information from communications data. This enables knowledge workers to always have the information they need to cultivate and expand relationships critical to success.
Affinity’s technology structure can analyze millions of data points across emails, calendars, and third-party sources to offer users the tools they need to automatically manage their most valuable relationships and prioritize the most important connections. As a result, Affinity helps discover untapped opportunities in their network.
Using artificial intelligence and natural language processing, Affinity analyzes relationship strength and illuminates the best paths to warm introductions thus enabling users to identify the people in their network who are suited to make a specific referral.
And through Affinity, users gain a holistic view of their relationships and they can track their communications in an automatically updated database without any manual data entry required by today’s CRM solutions. Affinity has helped users manage relationships across 20 million people and 5 million organizations so far. And the platform has identified 3 million warm introductions in its users’ networks and auto-populated over 300 million data fields with relevant content.
Affinity’s co-founders Zhou and Shubham Goel were both named to Forbes’ “30 Under 30” list for 2019. Joe Lonsdale, another co-founder of Affinity, was also the co-founder of Palantir and Addepar and was ranked 22nd on Forbes’ Midas List as one of the best deal makers in venture capital.
In conjunction with this funding round, Advance Venture Partners managing partner David T. ibnAle has joined Affinity’s board of directors. Before launching AVP, ibnAle was a veteran venture capital and private equity investor who served as Managing Director and Global Head of Investing at TPG Growth and as partner at Francisco Partners.
“Data is extremely valuable when it comes to building and nurturing professional relationships, but collecting, recording and accessing this data has traditionally been a time-consuming, manual process,” added Mr. ibnAle. “Affinity has found a way to harness the incredible amount of relationship data buried in our day-to-day communications and make it useful in a way that both simplifies relationship management and amplifies the value of our professional networks. Advance Venture Partners is not only an Affinity investor but was an early customer, and we understand firsthand how powerful the platform is in helping investment firms source and manage both investment opportunities and other relationships.”
