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Affinity Campfire 2025: What's Coming for VC Data Teams

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We were at The Presidio in San Francisco for Affinity's annual Campfire conference. Here's what was announced — and why it matters for funds investing in their data infrastructure.

Every year, Affinity brings together GPs, fund operators, and the technical teams behind them to talk about what's actually working in private capital. Campfire is where you hear from peers about how they're structuring their CRM, what they're automating, and where the tooling gaps still are.

For us at Loop3, this is core to what we do. We've been building on top of Affinity for 4+ years alongside other CRMs — integrating it into data warehouses, layering AI on top for deal intelligence, and designing workflows that make relationship data actually useful. Being in the room with the product team and other firms gives us early signal on where the ecosystem is heading.

This year, the announcements were significant. Here's the breakdown.

What Affinity Announced

MCP Integration: Affinity is releasing an MCP server — which means you'll be able to query your CRM data directly from AI copilots using natural language. Ask your assistant to prep a meeting brief, surface sourcing activity, or pull pipeline stats — all from live Affinity data. For firms building internal AI tools, this is a huge unlock.
LinkedIn Integration: Affinity contacts and LinkedIn connections can finally talk to each other. This makes registering interactions with founders, mapping networks, and finding warm intros significantly more seamless.
New Lists + Smart Search: Context-aware search that lets you find people, companies, or opportunities with natural queries instead of rigid filters. A major UX improvement for daily pipeline work.
API V2: A rebuilt, faster API with expanded endpoints and consistent schemas. This will make integrations far smoother — whether you're syncing Affinity with a data warehouse, analytics dashboard, or internal tools.
Sharing & Collaboration Controls: Better control over who can access what — critical for multi-team funds scaling collaboration across investment teams, ops, and portfolio groups.

Why This Matters

The CRM layer in private capital is evolving fast — but the real shift isn't about the CRM itself. It's about what sits underneath it. What Affinity is building with MCP and API V2 reinforces something we keep seeing with our clients: the firms getting the most out of their tools are the ones who thought about their data layer first.

Tools are commoditizing. The moat isn't which CRM you picked or which automation platform you're running — it's how you use your data and whether your systems are built to scale with you.
MCP opens up a new architecture for VC teams. Instead of building one-off dashboards or exporting CSVs, you can have an AI agent that queries your CRM alongside other data sources in real time. How much value that creates depends on how clean and accessible your data already is — but the direction is clear.
API V2 matters for a similar reason. Consistent schemas and expanded endpoints mean smoother integrations, whether you're feeding data into a warehouse, a dashboard, or internal tools your team built themselves.

Our Takeaways from SF

AI adoption is real, but uneven. Most firms know they need to do something with AI — the gap is in execution. The teams winning are the ones building on top of clean data foundations, not bolting AI onto messy workflows.
The data warehouse is becoming the default. More funds are centralizing in Snowflake or similar — not as a nice-to-have, but as the foundation for everything from LP reporting to AI-powered sourcing. Once your data lives in a warehouse, tools like MCP let AI query it directly. That's the unlock.
The moat is infrastructure, not workflows. Everyone can spin up an n8n flow or a Zapier automation. The firms pulling ahead are the ones who invested in scalable data systems — structured, governed, queryable. That's what compounds over time.b
Relationships still win deals. All the tooling in the world doesn't replace the warm intro. But the firms that can surface the right connection at the right moment — that's where technology creates real leverage.

Written by Franco Lagomarsino

Partner At Loop3