Venture capital software is a stack rather than a product, and the layers are added in an order that has more to do with a fund's age than with anyone's roadmap. At the bottom is the LP record, the commitments and calls and quarterly figures that exist from the first close. Above it is the deal pipeline the partners live in, then the portfolio companies and their figures, then the fund's books and NAV. This page describes each layer of the VC software stack, what a fund runs in it at each stage, and which layer this site's own product occupies, with the worked figures from its worksheets.
The bottom layer: the LP record, from the first close
The LP record exists the day the first commitment is signed and it never goes away. It holds each investor's commitment, every capital call against it, every distribution, and the documents sent. A venture fund calls capital in a few large notices, so each one matters: on the worked example a ten percent call against a five million dollar commitment is a notice for five hundred thousand dollars, leaving two million seven hundred and fifty thousand uncalled. From those entries the record computes the quarter's paid-in, DPI, RVPI and TVPI. This is the layer Rapportvo is, and it is the only layer it is.
The middle layers: the pipeline and the portfolio
The pipeline is the partners' daily software: the startups seen, the founders met, the co-investors, the warm paths, captured from email and calendar rather than typed. The portfolio is the companies the fund actually holds, their quarterly figures and their valuations, which start in a tab and move to a monitoring product when there are more than a dozen. Both layers are real products with real vendors, ranked and described elsewhere on this site, and neither is the LP record, however many contact fields it carries.
The top layer: the fund's books, the NAV and the close
The fund's general ledger, its NAV, the waterfall and the audited close are the administrator's layer, and a first fund often runs it through an accountant at year end before an administrator is hired. Its output that the LP record needs is one figure per quarter: the residual value of what the fund holds. The LP record takes it as an input and computes total value and TVPI from it; it does not produce it, and a venture capital software product that claims both is either an administration platform priced for a multi-fund manager or a record overreaching.
What a fund adds when
At the first close: the LP record. When the pipeline outgrows two partners' memory: the deal CRM. When the portfolio outgrows a tab: monitoring. When the fund outgrows an accountant's year end: the administrator. Buying the stack top-down at a first fund means paying for the layers you do not use yet and doing by hand the one you do. The worksheets on this site compute the bottom layer's figures free, so the first purchase can be judged on whether the record earns its keep.
Questions people ask about venture capital software
Is there one venture capital software product for the whole stack?
At the size of a firm with a deal team, an investor relations function and an administrator, the platforms built for that size cover most of it. A first fund buying one of them pays for four layers to use one.
Which layer does VC software usually mean in a search?
The pipeline, because it is where a venture firm's relationships are densest. The LP record is the layer nobody markets and every fund needs, which is why this page starts at the bottom.
Does Rapportvo connect to the other layers?
It exports every table as CSV for the administrator or the auditor and takes residual value as an input. It does not read a deal CRM or a monitoring product, and does not pretend to.