The solo GP tool problem

When I started making angel and scout investments, I signed up for 14 tools in the first month. I actively used maybe five. The rest sent onboarding emails I never opened.

The VC tool market is built for platform teams with dedicated ops staff. Pricing assumes multi-seat licenses. Features assume you have an associate to configure dashboards and run reports. As a solo GP, you need a fraction of the functionality at a fraction of the cost.

I've spent the last two years figuring out what actually works when you're one person managing a growing portfolio. Here's what I'd recommend across each category.

Portfolio monitoring

This is the category I care most about, and the one where I'm most biased, since I built Cura to solve it.

Cura pulls from LinkedIn, X, news, career pages, and other public sources continuously and classifies what it finds (hiring signals, product launches, fundraising activity, competitive moves) so your Monday morning isn't spent scrolling through feeds. It also ingests founder-reported data through CRM integrations, an email ingestion pipeline, iMessage and Slack agents, and document extraction. So the updates founders send you over text, email, or Slack get captured alongside public signals without needing a separate tool.

Standard Metrics collects structured financial data directly from founders. Founders connect their accounting tools or fill out reporting templates. Good if your primary need is tracking revenue, burn, and runway in a consistent format. The main tradeoff is founder response rates. Some founders are great about it, others go quiet for months.

Manual monitoring (LinkedIn + X + Google Alerts) is free and works at 4-5 companies. It breaks at 8+. I covered this in detail in how to track portfolio companies without drowning in tabs.

For most solo GPs, I'd recommend one tool that covers both public signals and founder-reported data so everything lives in one place. That's what Cura does. If your primary need is structured accounting integrations, Standard Metrics is worth a look. But if budget forces a single choice, pick the tool that covers the most ground.

LP reporting

LPs want four things quarterly: fund-level metrics, capital deployment summary, portfolio company updates, and your market perspective. The tool you use matters less than the data quality.

Google Docs or Notion — free, and honestly sufficient for Fund I with 10-15 LPs. Write a clean update, export to PDF, send via email. The limitation: no read tracking. You don't know which LPs actually opened it.

Visible — built for VC reporting. Handles metric collection, report building, and distribution with open tracking. Plans start around $150/month. Solid for a solo GP who wants a more polished output than a Google Doc.

Papermark — document sharing with analytics. Free tier available, paid plans from $29/month. Good middle ground if you mainly want read tracking on your existing documents.

What people miss about LP reporting: gathering portfolio data is the hard part, not formatting or distribution. If you're already monitoring your portfolio continuously, the quarterly report becomes a curation exercise rather than a 20-hour data collection sprint. I wrote a detailed guide on how to write LP updates that LPs actually read.

CRM and deal flow

I covered this in depth in the solo GP tech stack, so I'll keep it brief.

If you're seeing fewer than 50 companies a year, a spreadsheet or Airtable base is fine. Past 50-100 annual inbound, look at Attio (starts at $29/user/month) or Affinity (starts around $2,400/year per user). What matters is email integration and automatic relationship tracking so every founder touchpoint gets captured without manual logging.

Skip full VC platforms like Edda or Dynamo until Fund III. You're paying for features you won't use for three years.

Fund administration

Outsource this. The math is simple: a fund administrator costs $10-30K/year. Doing it yourself costs 100+ hours on compliance, tax prep, K-1s, and capital calls.

AngelList Stack bundles fund formation, banking, tax, and compliance. Roughly 0.15% of AUM annually with a minimum around $10K/year.

Carta does fund formation and administration starting around $6,500/year for smaller funds. Likely already in your portfolio companies' cap table stack.

Allocations targets smaller funds at roughly $10K/year.

Pick the one whose pricing fits your fund size and whose team is responsive. K-1s on time and capital calls processed correctly is what matters. Everything else is noise.

The minimal stack: 10 companies, $10M fund

Portfolio monitoring: Cura or Standard Metrics (~$200-300/month)
LP reporting: Google Docs (free) or Visible (~$150/month)
CRM: Airtable or spreadsheet (free)
Fund admin: AngelList Stack or Allocations (~$10-15K/year)
Everything else: Google Drive, Calendly, email

Total recurring: roughly $15-25K/year beyond legal costs. That's manageable on a 2% management fee.

The expanded stack: 25+ companies, Fund II

At this point your monitoring needs scale and your LP base likely expects more polish.

Portfolio monitoring: Cura for public signals + founder-reported data ingestion
LP reporting: Visible with templated quarterly reports
CRM: Attio or Affinity with email sync
Fund admin: Carta or Juniper Square (more enterprise features)
Data room: DocSend ($15/month) for fundraising deck tracking

Total recurring: roughly $30-50K/year. The jump from Fund I is mostly the CRM and the LP reporting tool.

What to skip until Fund III

PitchBook or Crunchbase Pro ($25K+/year and $49/month respectively). Your deal flow comes from your network, not database searches.
Portfolio analytics dashboards. Track IRR in a spreadsheet. Buy the dashboard when you have 25+ companies across vintages.
Multi-seat anything. You're one person.
Full VC platforms that bundle everything. You'll use 20% of the features and pay for 100%.

The best solo GP tech stack is the one you actually use every week. If you're not opening a tool at least weekly, cancel it and put that budget toward something you will.

For a broader look at how the VC software landscape has evolved, check out the VC software stack in 2026.