A venture capital CRM is usually described from the deal side, because that is where a venture firm's relationships are densest: hundreds of founders, dozens of co-investors, the scouts and the lawyers. The investor side is quieter, a few dozen limited partners, and it is the side where a mistake costs the most. This page describes what a VC fund keeps in each side of its CRM, how the two meet on the day a fund closes, and what the investor side has to compute rather than store. It uses the worked figures from this site's worksheets so every number can be checked on the page.
The deal side: the graph of everyone the fund has met
The deal side of a venture capital CRM is a relationship graph: every startup seen, every founder met, every co-investor who shared a deal, every introducer, with the strength of each tie read from the firm's own email and calendar. Its value is in never asking anyone to type, and its outputs are the pipeline, the relationship map and the warm path to a founder. Products built for it are ranked on this site's page on the best CRM for venture capital; this page leaves the deal side there and turns to the other half.
The investor side: commitments, calls in a few large notices, and exits
A venture fund's LP record is small and precise. Each limited partner has a commitment; the fund calls it in a handful of large notices over the investment period rather than deal by deal; distributions arrive when a company exits and are often stock; and the quarterly update reports paid-in, distributions, residual value and the multiples over paid-in. On this site's worked example a fund with ten million dollars of commitments and six and a half million paid in reports a DPI of zero point four zero times, an RVPI of one point four five times and a TVPI of one point eight five times, and every LP's share of those follows from their commitment.
Where the two sides meet: the close
The one day the two sides of a venture capital CRM touch is a fund close. The prospective investors the partners have been courting on the deal side's graph become commitments on the investor side, and if the two are separate products every name is retyped and every conversation lost. A CRM that holds a prospect as an investor row with no commitment yet, and turns it into a commitment at the close, is the one that survives that day. After the close the two sides rarely need each other again until the next fund is raised.
What the investor side computes, and what it only stores
Stored: the commitment, the investor's eligibility as counsel confirmed it, who owns the relationship, and every document that went out. Computed: each capital call amount from the commitment and the percentage, the uncalled balance after it, paid-in as the sum of calls, DPI and RVPI and TVPI as ratios over paid-in. A venture capital CRM that stores the computed figures as typed fields is a contact list with a reporting tab; one that computes them is an investor record. Rapportvo is the second kind and only the second kind.
Questions people ask about venture capital crm
Does a venture capital CRM need the portfolio companies in it?
The deal side holds them as the outcome of the pipeline. Monitoring them, their cap tables and their valuations is a separate job with its own products, and the residual value the LP letter reports is that job's output. The investor side takes it as an input and does not produce it.
How many LPs before a spreadsheet stops working?
It is not the count, it is the second capital call. One call to any number of LPs is a mail merge; the second call means called-to-date per investor, uncalled per investor and a reconciliation of every wire, and that is the point at which a record with a commitment per row earns its keep.
Can the same product be the deal CRM and the investor record?
At a firm with both a deal team and an investor relations function, the platforms built for that size can. Below it, most funds run a deal CRM for the graph and keep the investors either in the administrator's portal or in a record like this one, and share a list of names between the two.