Welcome to my annual VC tool stack update - 2026 edition!

I’ve been tracking tools for investors for more than 8 years now - and the world has changed dramatically. From pen & paper to scalable automations & true AI copilots.

If you haven’t recognized, you’re really missing out.

The VC investment job is not the same as it used to, and here’s why..

In 2017, my list had merely 100 tools on it and it was fairly easy to find the most relevant solutions for a specific problem, test the two or three competing ones and settle for the best.

For example, when we were looking for a new CRM system dedicated to VCs, there was essentially just Affinity out there. So the question was to either customize a generic solution for ourselves or go with the only VC-centric provider - though early in their own journey. Same was true for data providers. There was essentially Crunchbase, Pitchbook, and CBInsights.

Three years later, by summer 2020, the list had grown to 200 tools.

Two years later, by summer 2022, it already hit 300.

The momentum and interest in investment tech started picking up - one of the reasons why I started this newsletter in Sept 2022: To provide more signal in a world full of growing noise.

Knowing that my list was likely not comprehensive, I reached out to our DDVC community and crowdsourced the tools used by 250+ VC firms. I published the resulting list of 400 tools as part of the Data Driven VC Landscape 2023.

At that time, we saw the beginning of a new era of investment tech. While in the past most sourcing, enrichment, screening, and due diligence tools for VCs were useless due to the unstructured and qualitative nature of the underlying data, AI has changed the game.

Not only did the tools become more powerful but also - for the first time in VC history - investors started genuinely rethinking their workflows and how they spend their time. Who could’ve anticipated this?…

By 2024, the list has grown to 600 tools and in 2025, we’ve surpassed 1000 (!) - the point where I stopped tracking.

As a reflection of this tool explosion, my tool stack has also changed over the years. From a a dozen or so generic productivity tools and 2-3 key systems in 2017 to 100+ tools in 2024.

I called it the “VC Digitization Journey”: From “old-school VCs” with generic CRMs and MS Office Suite to “productivity VCs” with dedicated CRMs like Affinity or Attio and productivity tools such as Calendly or Notion, to Data Driven VCs who develop their own tech stack including data infra and web apps.

By 2025, the complexity of my tool stack peaked and I spent more time context switching and connecting siloed data than anything else.

In parallel, we’ve seen first signs of consolidation with CBInsights acquiring Venture Source, AlphaSense acquiring Tegus, Carta acquiring Vauban, Tactyc, and others. Organic and inorganic expansions have led to increasing overlap across providers, creating redundancies, and incentives to get rid of some solutions.

Throughout the last year, I’ve drastically consolidated my stack, added a few new tools, and have started to connect it all with Claude Code and n8n.

I share my top 30 tools and what I use them for in this brief walkthrough video here.

One of the most frequently asked questions by our community - and I can see why: overload.

Overload of work and overload of tools. Majority of investors keep working in the machine and rarely find the time to zoom out and start working on the machine.

If they ever do, they struggle where to start and quickly get overwhelmed by the infinite opportunities and solutions out there. So most just get back to work they used to.

Easy in the short-term. Painful in the long-term.

Some - and as you’re reading this now, I’m sure you’re one of them - don’t want to accept the status quo. And this is for you: I’ve recorded another brief video where I walk through my tool evaluation process that has led to the stack described above and helps me to decide which new tools to add.

Make sure to hit subscribe on the YouTube channel as I’ll share more videos from our “VC Automation Experiment” soon. And if you haven’t joined our free Slack community yet, come find me and 200+ peers here.

Next week, I’ll share how I use Claude Code and how you can set it up without any technical knowledge step-by-step in 2 minutes.

Trust me, Claude Code + n8n is MAAAAAGIC.

Stay driven (& cheers from the rabbit hole at 2.47am),
Andre

PS: In case you’re wondering, the thumbnails are created in one shot with our portfolio company Black Forest Labs with the prompt “you're a worldclass thumbnail editor who knows how to create viral youtube thumbnails. generate one for a video called XXX”