Kosa Research · July 2026
What Venture Firms Actually Pay for Their Software Stack
What firms use as their system of record, what the tools cost, and the labor bill that never appears on an invoice. Original data from a survey of US venture firms and the signed contracts behind their stacks.
A typical mid-size venture firm pays $60,000 to $80,000 a year for three or four tools to keep records nobody at the firm fully trusts. The real number is higher, because the biggest cost never appears on an invoice: the analyst hours spent feeding the tools. We know because we surveyed US venture firms about their stacks this spring and read the signed contracts behind several of them. If you run a fund and have ever wondered whether everyone else's setup is as expensive and unsatisfying as yours: yes. Here is the benchmark.
The landscape
What firms actually use
Ask venture firms what their system of record is and you get more than ten different answers. From our survey:
- A slim majority (54%) use Affinity. It is the market leader by a wide margin, and the default answer.
- 15% use no CRM at all, including some of the best-known early-stage firms in the country. Not neglect: a deliberate choice to run high-volume pipelines on email and memory.
- A meaningful minority runs two or more record systems at once. One firm runs three CRM platforms simultaneously. Another built its own from scratch. Several run their record on Airtable, a general-purpose spreadsheet-database.
- The rest is a long tail: fund-admin platforms doing double duty, portfolio monitoring tools "partially" used as a record, one firm on a generic CRM plus LinkedIn.
The spread is the finding. When sophisticated buyers with the same job produce answers ranging from "nothing" to "we built our own" to "three at once," the market has not solved their problem.
The invoices
What the tools cost
Public list prices are rare in this category. Real agreements and vendor proposals show:
| Tool | Pricing shape | Cost | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Affinity | Flat annual, per-firm | $30,000-40,000 / yr | Publicly discussed at $2,000-2,700 per user per year |
| Per-seat relationship platforms | Per seat, monthly | $18,000-27,000 / yr | About $150 per user per month, 10-15 person firm |
| Portfolio monitoring | Flat annual + volume | $40,000 / yr | Up to 100 portfolio companies; $10,000 one-time implementation; $500 per additional company per year |
| Contract terms (uniform) | All vendors | 5% / yr escalator | 90-day cancellation notice, net 30 payment |
Stacked, the arithmetic is simple: one fund whose contracts we reviewed pays $58,000 to $77,000 a year for two tools, before the notes app, the drive, and the spreadsheets holding everything the paid tools miss. If your own total lands in the $60-80K range, you are the median, not the outlier.
The hidden line item
The cost that never appears on an invoice
The people signing these contracts know the software is the cheap part. One fund controller, walking us through his stack line by line, waved off the cheapest tool: the couple thousand dollars didn't matter. What mattered was the much larger sum in a team member's time keeping it fed. Cut the hours, he said, and the license price is noise.
His firm collects updates from roughly 200 portfolio companies, several forms each, about 600 documents per reporting cycle, filled out by hand, no automation permitted, each one read and keyed in manually by one person on a one-month deadline.
That labor is priced against a junior analyst salary of roughly $150,000 a year, and it buys surprisingly little: industry estimates put CRM field completion at venture firms around 30 to 40 percent. Enterprise prices, mostly empty records, and people paying for the gap.
Findings
What the benchmark actually says
Finding 01
The most sophisticated firms opting out is a verdict. The no-CRM group evaluated the market and concluded that maintaining a CRM costs more than the record is worth. When a category's most discerning buyers choose "nothing," the category has a design problem, not a distribution problem.
Finding 02
Multi-tool stacks mean no tool works. Nobody pays for three CRMs because one is good. Those firms are doing manual integration between systems, usually via an analyst and a spreadsheet, and the staleness lands where it hurts: one operations leader described sifting portfolio updates out of email threads by hand because the systems meant to hold them never do.
Finding 03
Even simple questions are expensive. A test one investor gave us: ask your firm how many deals it has seen this month. Just the count. Most firms cannot produce it without juggling exports, and questions of that shape come up every day. The knowledge exists; the record never received it.
Finding 04
In fairness to the incumbents: switching is genuinely expensive. An operations leader at a large firm told us the cost of even testing a new tool is very high: where does it live, what does it replace, what is it a complement to. That is why firms stay for years on tools they will freely describe as flawed.
The diagnosis
Why every stack looks like this
Every tool holds one slice: contacts in the CRM, meetings in the notes app, documents in the drive, the portfolio in a spreadsheet. None of them talk, so the firm's actual knowledge, who we know, what we decided, why we passed, lives in the gaps and in a few heads, and the integration layer between the tools has always been human beings. A partner at a decades-old firm put the endpoint bluntly: over the firm's lifetime, something like 98% of the institutional value it generated has been lost with the people who carried it.
The $60-80K is rent on that arrangement. The invisible labor is interest.
What changes now
The reason to publish this
AI can read the email, the meeting, and the board deck directly and keep a record current without anyone entering data. The expensive part was never storage; it was keeping the record true. That is the design principle behind Kosa, the AI-native system of record for venture capital firms we are building at Aligned Agent Inc. (incubated by AlleyCorp): one record, built from the firm's own communication, maintained by agents instead of analysts.
FAQ
Frequently asked questions
How much does a venture capital firm spend on software?
A mid-size firm typically spends $60,000 to $80,000 a year across three or four record-keeping tools, based on our 2026 survey of US venture firms and the contracts behind several of their stacks, before counting staff time spent on data entry and reconciliation.
What CRM do most VC firms use?
Affinity leads clearly, at 54% of firms in our survey. The rest fragments across Salesforce, DealCloud, Attio, Airtable, niche tools, in-house builds, and, for 15% of firms, nothing at all.
Why do some VC firms use no CRM?
Because the economics of maintenance fail. A CRM holds only what people type, data entry loses to actual investing, and the record decays until email and memory beat a stale database.
What are typical contract terms for VC software?
Five percent annual escalators, 90-day cancellation notice, and net 30 payment are standard. Implementation fees around $10,000 are common for portfolio monitoring platforms and generally accepted without negotiation.
Methodology
Tool usage from a March 2026 survey of 41 US venture capital firms conducted by Kosa. Pricing from signed agreements, vendor proposals, and publicly discussed ranges. Quotes from research conversations with fund operations leaders and investors, anonymized. Firms are not identified. Questions, corrections, or press: [email protected].