About Stride.VC
Stride.VC is a London-based seed stage venture capital firm backing ambitious founders across Europe. Founded in 2018, the fund invests at pre-seed and seed, with a lean team that prioritises hands-on support over process. Stride manages two existing funds and a portfolio of 120+ founders across Europe.
The Challenge
Stride had been using Affinity for years. The decision to move to Attio was already made before the engagement started - the question was how to do it right.
The complexity was not in the volume of data but in its structure. Stride's CRM needs are fundamentally different from a standard SaaS sales team. LP relationships are multi-layered: a limited partner like a large institutional investor may communicate through a principal contact, a fund administrator at a separate company, and a legal/compliance contact - all linked to the same LP entity but sitting at different organisations. Affinity's interface made this hard to manage cleanly.
Stride also manages two funds with shared LPs across both. Contacts needed to be filterable by fund without duplicating records or losing shared relationship history. And unlike most VC CRM projects, Stride is not actively investing - the CRM is primarily about managing existing LP relationships and supporting portfolio founders, not tracking new deals.
One additional pain point: building targeted investor lists for portfolio founders going fundraising required pulling from a database of ~900 VC funds and sharing filtered lists externally. Affinity made this near impossible without exporting to Notion or rebuilding lists manually each time.
Our Approach
Novlini delivered the migration and workspace setup over 5 days within a one-month engagement, working directly with Stride's founder and operations lead.
Data Architecture Design
The first decision was the data model. Standard Attio setups use Companies and People as the two core objects. For a fund like Stride, LP relationships are more complex than a standard company-contact link: the same investor may have multiple contacts across different organisations, each playing a different role. We designed a custom object structure that reflects how Stride actually thinks about their LPs - stable investor identities that persist regardless of contact or legal entity changes, with role-based contact attributes to filter by function without duplicating records.
Fund Segmentation
With multiple funds under management and shared LPs across them, we structured the workspace to give the team clean filtered views by fund - without duplicating records or losing shared relationship history. Each LP's investment vehicle and legal structure is tracked at the fund level, since the same investor may use different entities across vehicles.
Affinity Data Migration
Full export and migration of Affinity data across all core relationship lists: LPs, portfolio founders, VC funds, angels, and key ecosystem contacts. Data was cleaned before import to strip redundant fields and enrichment artifacts. A consistent people taxonomy was applied across all records from day one, giving the team a single filterable view of their entire network by relationship type.
VC Funds Database
~900 VC funds migrated into Attio as a structured, queryable database. The team can now build filtered target lists for portfolio founders going fundraising - by stage, geography, or sector - directly in Attio, without rebuilding lists in Notion or exporting to spreadsheets.
Technology Stack
Attio - CRM, LP management, VC database, portfolio founder tracking (replaces Affinity)
The Results
Stride completed the full transition from Affinity to Attio within the engagement window, with a data model purpose-built for their fund management workflow.
Custom LP data model live - Stride Investors object with fund-level segmentation, contact function attributes, and linked People records
Two-fund architecture - Fund 1 and Fund 2 managed as distinct lists with shared LP records and filtered views by fund and contact role
~900 VC funds migrated - queryable database for founder fundraising target lists, shareable externally
120+ portfolio founders migrated - clean people records with full interaction history
Full Affinity migration complete - LP pipeline, founders, angels, and VC ecosystem data ported with taxonomy applied
Time-to-live: 1 month
"The team at Novlini were systematic, consistent, and clear in their communication. The quality of the work was high. They are solutions-oriented, which means they did not let any of the issues go until a solution was found. We had a great experience."
Fred Destin, Founder - Stride.VC ★★★★★
Why It Matters
VC CRM migrations are rarely about volume. They are about preserving the relationship intelligence that a fund has built over years - who knows whom, who is a principal versus an administrator, which LP was in Fund 1 versus Fund 2 - and rebuilding it in a system that actually reflects how the team thinks.
Affinity to Attio is one of the most common migration paths in VC right now. Teams want Attio's flexibility and API, but the schema design is the hard part - Affinity's relationship intelligence doesn't map cleanly to standard CRM objects. Getting it right requires designing the data model before touching the import.
For any VC or fund management team looking to make the switch without losing LP history or deal context, this is how it's done.