About Atlantic VC
Atlantic VC is a Berlin-based pan-European pre-seed VC firm founded in 2013, backing mission-driven founders across climatetech, digital health, AI/data, fintech and proptech. The fund leads rounds from €25K to €5M+ and invests at the earliest stages - often before a company has a domain name, a team, or even a product. With a lean investment team managing hundreds of inbound deals per month plus an active outbound sourcing motion, Atlantic needed a CRM that could handle the pace and complexity of pre-seed deal flow.
The Challenge
Atlantic had been using Affinity for years but the decision to move to Attio was already made. Affinity's API constraints and lack of product evolution had made it difficult to scale, and the LP tracker's dual-sheet structure had created data duplication across the team.
Three structural challenges made this migration more complex than a standard CRM move.
Volume and incomplete data at pre-seed. Atlantic sees hundreds of inbound deals per month, many from founders who don't yet have a domain name or a registered company. Standard migration tooling relies on domain and email matching - a significant portion of their Affinity data fell outside that. Handling those records cleanly without polluting the new workspace required a deliberate approach.
Three distinct use cases, one workspace. Atlantic uses their CRM for deal flow (inbound pipeline and outbound sourcing), LP fundraising (managing the fund's own capital raise), and VC ecosystem management (tracking co-investors to help portfolio founders raise their next round). Each of these requires a different data model, different views, and different privacy considerations.
Manual deal entry at high volume. The team was manually entering every inbound pitch, intro, and sourced company into the CRM. With hundreds of deals per month, this was a significant drag on the team's time.
Our Approach
Novlini delivered the project in 8 days: 6 days for migration and data model build, 2 days for the deal flow automation.
Data Model Design
The workspace was built around 6 objects reflecting how Atlantic actually operates.
Companies and People - standard Attio objects, enriched with custom attributes including source of introduction, investment stage, last funding data, and cross-references to the VC and LP objects.
Deals - Atlantic's inbound and outbound deal flow pipeline. Custom attributes include channel (inbound / outbound / referral), quality assessment, segment, and a multi-owner field to handle deal teams. The Affinity date-added field was preserved as a migration attribute to maintain historical pipeline context.
VCs - a dedicated object for co-investor relationship management. Each VC record tracks the firm, focus areas, preferred stage, and the full deal matching context needed to build targeted fundraising lists for portfolio founders.
LPs - a dedicated object for the fund's own capital raise pipeline. Tracks investor type, commitment amounts, close date, probability, and SPV participation. The existing Affinity setup had a dual-sheet structure with data duplication that was resolved cleanly during migration.
Portfolio Companies - a lightweight object linking portfolio companies to their Deal records and VC relationships, giving the team a clean view of each portco's investor network.
Angels - angel investor tracking with focus areas, ticket size, portfolio companies, and holding vehicle.
Migration
Full export and migration from Affinity across all core lists: deal flow, LP pipeline, VC tracker, angels, and key contacts. Notes and files migrated and attached to the correct records. Domain-based matching for companies, email-based for people - with a dedicated cleanup view for records without a domain or email to handle edge cases without disrupting the main import.
Deal ownership was restructured to support deal teams: Attio's native deal owner auto-fills on record creation, with a separate multi-select owners attribute for the full team. Team enablement delivered via recorded walkthroughs covering deal flow, LP pipeline, and VC tracker workflows.
Deal Flow Automation
Built on N8N with a Claude AI layer. A dedicated intake email address is set up for the fund. When a team member forwards an intro or pitch email, the workflow parses the email content, extracts company and founder details, and creates a Deal record in Attio automatically. The forwarding team member is mapped to the deal owner. Pitch decks and attachments are linked to the deal record.
Technology Stack
Attio - CRM, 6-object data model, deal flow, LP pipeline, VC ecosystem (replaces Affinity)
N8N + Claude AI - automation layer for email-to-deal workflow
The Results
Atlantic completed the full transition from Affinity to Attio in 8 days of work, with a purpose-built 6-object data model and deal flow automation live.
6-object data model live - Deals, VCs, LPs, Portfolio Companies, Angels, alongside Companies and People
LP fundraising pipeline migrated - investor types, commitments, and pipeline stages structured and deduplicated from the previous dual-sheet Affinity setup
VC matching engine built - focus areas, preferred stages, and deal context tracked per VC to support portfolio founder fundraising
Full interaction history preserved - notes and files migrated and re-attached across all records
Email-to-deal automation live - inbound pitches forwarded to intake address create Attio records automatically via N8N + Claude
Why It Matters
Pre-seed deal flow is one of the hardest CRM problems in venture. The volume is high, the data is incomplete, and deals move in one to four weeks. A system that requires manual entry for every inbound pitch is a system the team stops using.
The email forwarding automation solves the entry problem at source. But the bigger value here is the VC matching layer: a structured database of co-investors with full context on what they've seen, what they've passed on, and what to show them next. For a pre-seed fund whose core value-add is helping founders raise their Series A, that object is the product.