The VC Software Stack in 2026: What's Changed

Sharan Jhangiani·
venture capital toolsVC softwaretech stackfund operations

The market has grown up

Two years ago, the VC software market was a mess. Dozens of overlapping tools, none of them great. You'd sign up for something, realize it was built for private equity and awkwardly adapted for venture, and go back to spreadsheets.

That's changed. Categories have consolidated and a few clear winners have emerged in each layer. Pricing has gotten more predictable. AI has moved from marketing buzzword to actual capability in a handful of tools.

Here's how the landscape looks now, organized by the layers of a VC's workflow.

CRM and deal flow

This layer has largely been settled.

Attio has become the default for small to mid-size funds. It syncs with your email and calendar automatically, has clean pipeline views, and starts at $29/user/month. The relationship intelligence, automatically tracking every touchpoint with a founder, is what matters here. Not the CRM features themselves.

Affinity does the same thing at a higher price point (starting around $2,400/year per user). It's been around longer and has deeper integrations with some LP-facing tools. If your fund is established and already on Affinity, there's no strong reason to switch.

Airtable still works for early-stage funds seeing fewer than 50 companies a year. Free tier is fine. Don't overthink this one.

Salesforce is legacy in this space. Some large funds still use it because switching costs are high. No one new is signing up for Salesforce to run a venture fund.

Full VC platforms like Edda and Dynamo bundle deal management with other features. The bundling sounds appealing, but in practice most funds outgrow the CRM in these platforms and end up needing a dedicated tool anyway. Save yourself the migration.

Fund administration

The unsexy but essential layer.

AngelList Stack remains the default for emerging managers. Fund formation, banking, tax, compliance in one platform. Roughly 0.15% of AUM annually, minimum around $10K/year. The simplicity is the selling point.

Carta does fund admin alongside its cap table business. Starting around $6,500/year for smaller funds. If your portfolio companies are already on Carta, there's natural overlap. Pricing has increased and the interface has gotten complex, but the product works.

Juniper Square targets larger operations — $15K+/year. More enterprise features, better LP portal. Makes sense once you're managing multiple funds or have institutional LPs who expect a polished experience.

Allocations targets smaller funds at roughly $10K/year. Good option for Fund I managers who want straightforward administration.

The decision here is mostly about fund size and how much hand-holding you need. All of these get the basics right — K-1s, capital calls, compliance.

Portfolio monitoring

This is the layer that's changed the most in the last two years. It used to not exist as a real category. Now there are distinct approaches.

Public signal monitoring + founder data ingestion is the most comprehensive approach. Cura (which I built, so I'm biased) monitors public sources (LinkedIn, X, news, career pages) continuously and classifies signals by type: hiring, product launches, competitive moves, fundraising. It also ingests founder-reported data through CRM integrations, email ingestion, iMessage and Slack agents, and document extraction. No need to stitch together separate tools for public signals and founder updates.

Founder-reported data collection as a standalone category. Standard Metrics connects to accounting software or uses reporting templates to pull in revenue, burn, headcount. Visible combines founder data collection with LP reporting. Good if structured accounting integrations are your primary need.

Manual approaches — Google Alerts, spreadsheets, and the Monday LinkedIn scroll. Still the most common approach, especially for smaller portfolios. Free, but doesn't scale and depends on discipline that tends to fade.

I wrote a detailed comparison of portfolio monitoring tools if you want to go deeper.

Data and research

The sourcing and research layer has a clear split between expensive institutional products and lighter alternatives.

PitchBook ($25K+/year) is the institutional standard. Comprehensive company and deal data. Worth it if you're doing high-volume sourcing or need detailed market maps. Overkill for a solo GP making 4-8 investments a year.

Crunchbase ($49/month for Pro) gives you funding data and basic company profiles. Useful for quick lookups and deal sourcing. Not deep enough for serious research.

Harmonic and Sourcescrub are newer players focused on early-stage sourcing — finding companies before they show up on PitchBook. More relevant for seed-stage funds that need pipeline volume.

For most emerging managers, free Crunchbase + your network is sufficient for deal sourcing. Your investment thesis and founder relationships are the real deal flow engine, not databases.

LP reporting

Visible has the strongest position here, combining data collection with report building and distribution. Open tracking tells you which LPs read your updates. Plans start around $150/month.

Google Docs / Notion — free and honestly sufficient for Fund I. Write a clean quarterly update, export to PDF, send via email. You lose read tracking but gain simplicity.

Papermark — document sharing with analytics, starting free with paid plans from $29/month. Good middle ground for LP report distribution with read tracking.

The bottleneck in LP reporting is always the data gathering, not the formatting or distribution tool. If your portfolio monitoring is good, the quarterly report writes itself in a few hours. If it isn't, you're spending 20+ hours chasing founders for updates before you can start writing. I covered this in how to write an LP update that LPs actually read.

AI in VC tools: what's real

Most VC tools now mention AI in their marketing. Here's what's actually useful vs. what's marketing:

Real and useful today: Classification of unstructured data (turning LinkedIn posts into structured hiring/product/funding signals), summarization of long documents, draft generation for LP reports based on structured data.

Promising but early: Automated competitive intelligence, pattern matching across portfolios, predictive signals for follow-on timing.

Mostly marketing: "AI-powered deal sourcing" that's really just filtered database queries, "AI CRM" that's autocomplete for notes.

The test I use: does the AI do something you couldn't do manually, or does it just do it faster? If it's the latter, it's a nice-to-have. If it's the former, pay attention.

Recommended stacks by fund size

Solo GP, $5-15M fund, Fund I:

  • CRM: Airtable or spreadsheet (free)
  • Fund admin: AngelList Stack ($10-15K/year)
  • Portfolio monitoring: One tool — either Cura or Standard Metrics ($200-300/month)
  • LP reporting: Google Docs (free)
  • Total: ~$15-20K/year

Small team (2-3 people), $25-50M fund:

  • CRM: Attio ($29/user/month)
  • Fund admin: Carta or AngelList Stack ($10-20K/year)
  • Portfolio monitoring: Cura (public signals + founder data ingestion)
  • LP reporting: Visible ($150/month)
  • Total: ~$30-45K/year

Platform fund, $100M+:

  • CRM: Affinity or Attio (team plan)
  • Fund admin: Carta or Juniper Square
  • Portfolio monitoring: Multiple tools + dedicated analyst
  • LP reporting: Visible or custom
  • Data: PitchBook
  • Total: $75K+/year

For a more detailed breakdown of tools specifically for one-person funds, see the best tools for solo GPs. And for the original take on this topic, here's the solo GP tech stack from 2025.