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Brought to you by Affinity - Campfire 2025 is coming to London!

Private capital teams are drowning in emails, data, and shifting markets—just as competition for the best deals reaches new heights. On October 28, 2025, Affinity Campfire London will bring together leading investors, dealmakers, and operators to turn that noise into actionable insight.

Join peers for an afternoon of networking and hands-on learning. From smarter sourcing and fundraising to practical AI integration, you’ll take home proven tactics, hands-on demos, and real-world success stories you can deploy immediately.

In the last two weeks, I covered why now is the best time to start leveraging AI for investing and how I would start today if I’d need to build a tech stack for a VC firm all over again - based on 8 years of experience of transforming Earlybird VC.

Last episode, I asked a question:

89% of readers want to see the most prominently used tools by 500+ firms from our VC Tool Finder platform - so here we go.

Today, I’ll share:

Let’s jump in!

Our unique data shows that VC tool stacks follow a rough 80/20 logic: Very few tools (20 or so out of 600+ that we track) like Affinity, Carta, Crunchbase, Harmonic, Notion, and Superhuman are used by a big majority (more than 80%) of all investment firms.

However, the majority of tools are are only used by small subsets of investors. Oftentimes, these investor groups share clear characteristics like fund size, geography or industry focus. For example, firms investing in Europe tend to rely on Dealroom as a data source or funds with larger fund sizes leverage more data sources that are oftentimes redundant and more expensive, such as Pitchbook or CB Insights.

What’s interesting, however, is that the group of “early adopters” who use tools like Granola, WhisprFlow, ArcBrowser, and others cannot be segmented based on characteristics. Said differently, there’s no pattern for early adopters as they come from all fund sizes, all AUM groups, all geographies, all industry focuses, etc.

First and foremost, my stack continues to simplify as I cannot stand context switching and data siloes that are not in synch anymore.

Within 2 years, I went down from a bit more than 100 tools to roughly 60. So almost halved the number of tools in my stack.

Not only does it save me costs in number of subscriptions, but it also reduces the fragmentation of information and data siloes. Platformization & consolidation is for real and the incentives for using as many products as possible from as few vendors as necessary continue to increase.

Last episode, I highlighted that automation tools like Zapier have been the glue connecting my fragmented stack. Fast forward to today, this is still true but I recently started shifting more and more automation flows to MCP and n8n.

An MCP Server is a modular software backend that integrates:

Put simply, the MCP server allows you to feed in noisy real-world data (emails, PDFs, scraped bios, decks, call notes etc.), and ask high-quality, highly personalized questions like:

It acts like an always-on chief-of-staff, analyst, and memory extension—available 24/7, and only getting smarter over time. Tell me you don’t want this too? ;)