About b2venture
b2venture (formerly btov Partners) is a St. Gallen-based venture capital firm founded in 2000. One of Europe's most active early-stage investors, the firm manages five funds with over 400 investments to date, including early positions in DeepL, SumUp, and Raisin. b2venture operates a community-driven model integrating a network of over 350 angel investors alongside its institutional investment team. The firm closed Fund V at 150 million euros in January 2026, its largest vehicle to date. With 26 team members across St. Gallen, Berlin, and Luxembourg, b2venture runs two distinct pipelines simultaneously: deal flow across pre-seed through Series A, and an LP and angel network management function that sits alongside it.
The Challenge
b2venture had been running on Salesforce for years. The instance had grown complex over time, with more objects and fields active than the team actually used, workarounds proliferating in spreadsheets alongside the CRM, and a user experience that was increasingly at odds with how a modern investment team wants to work. The firm was also mid-transition from Microsoft 365 to Google Workspace, which added a layer of complexity to the migration: any premature sync between Attio and Microsoft email risked creating contact duplicates that would carry forward into the new system.
The data itself was unusually complex. b2venture's Salesforce instance had been built to track not just deal flow and portfolio companies, but also the firm's large angel co-investor network, LP relationships, and pitch deck file attachments at volume. The Salesforce IDs and object relationships were deeply intertwined, making a clean extraction and remapping significantly harder than a standard migration. The team described their use of the CRM as closer to an ERP than a sales tool, reflecting the operational breadth of what it tracked.
Along with the migration came a parallel requirement to sequence correctly: the move to Google Workspace needed to complete before the full Attio onboarding could happen, so that email sync would land cleanly without duplicates.
Our Approach
Novlini ran the engagement across several months, coordinating the migration sequencing with the parallel Microsoft-to-Google transition and delivering a phased rollout designed to avoid disruption during the email switch.
Discovery and Mapping
The engagement began with a detailed discovery of b2venture's existing Salesforce data model: all active objects, attributes, and relationships mapped into a structured spreadsheet with every field marked for migration or deprecation. Given the complexity of the instance, this phase required close collaboration with b2venture's technical lead to understand which data was actively used, which had accumulated over the years without purpose, and what the correct target state in Attio should look like.
The fund's unique operating model, dual deal flow and angel network pipelines running in parallel, was mapped in Figma and used as the foundation for the Attio data model design. Portfolio tracking, LP relationships, and co-investor attribution were all scoped into the architecture.
Migration Sequencing
Rather than a single cutover, the migration was structured in phases. The data model design, Attio build, and initial training were completed first, allowing the team to prepare and validate everything without yet synchronizing email. Full onboarding and live email sync were held until after the Google Workspace transition completed, ensuring no contact duplicates from the Microsoft-to-Google crossover period carried into the new CRM.
A Salesforce data export was taken before the email migration as a precautionary snapshot, protecting against any data loss during the infrastructure change.
Salesforce Migration
The full data migration covered contacts, companies, deal records, portfolio entries, LP relationships, and co-investor network records. Salesforce ID mappings were resolved to preserve association integrity across objects. File attachments, primarily pitch decks, were scoped to Google Drive rather than Attio, matching the firm's existing workflow and Attio's design philosophy.
Enablement
With 26 users across three offices, the enablement phase included structured training sessions, a Notion documentation workspace covering the new data model and key workflows, and a dedicated Slack channel for the transition period. Early adopters from the technical team were onboarded first to absorb feedback before the broader rollout.
Technology Stack
Attio - CRM, deal flow pipeline, angel network, LP tracking, portfolio management (source of truth)
Google Workspace - email sync, calendar integration, native Attio connection
Google Drive - pitch deck and file attachment storage
Salesforce - source system (migrated from)
The Results
b2venture completed one of the more complex Salesforce-to-Attio migrations Novlini has delivered, with 26 users live on the new system and a clean data model reflecting the firm's actual operating structure.
26 users migrated from a complex Salesforce instance to Attio, across three offices
Full data model rebuilt to reflect b2venture's dual pipeline structure: deal flow and angel co-investor network tracked distinctly
Migration sequenced correctly around the Microsoft-to-Google transition, with no contact duplication from the email switch
Salesforce IDs resolved — the non-standard object relationships that complicated the extraction were cleanly remapped into Attio's data structure
Pitch deck workflow preserved — file attachments routed to Google Drive rather than forcing a workaround in Attio
Team positive on day one — internal feedback immediately contrasted the new experience favorably with the Salesforce instance they had left
"It was one of the most seamless migrations I've seen. Communication was perfect, reaction times were as good as it can get. The contrast to Salesforce is very clear."
Andreas G. - b2venture ★★★★★
Why It Matters
For a 25-year-old fund with 400 investments and a large angel co-investor community, the CRM is not just a deal tracker. It is the institutional memory of the firm. Every contact, every co-investment relationship, every LP touchpoint lives there. A migration of this kind is not a technology project, it is an operational risk event, and the sequencing matters as much as the technical execution.
The key insight from this engagement is that complex VC migrations require a discovery phase proportional to the complexity of the operating model, not the size of the user base. b2venture had 26 users and a CRM that functioned like an ERP. Getting that right meant starting with the data model, not the data.