About Valiance
Valiance is a London-based global investment firm focused on eCommerce, HealthTech, MedTech, and AgriTech. Founded in 2008, the firm manages a portfolio of impact-driven companies and counts family offices, private banks, and institutional investors among its LP base. With a CEO who has built relationships across financial markets over 25 years, Valiance holds a contact database representing decades of relationship-building - a strategic asset that had never been properly structured or maintained.
The Challenge
Valiance was operating on HubSpot, but the tool was only being used for one thing: sending quarterly investor newsletters and portfolio updates. The real problem was the contact database itself.
Over 7,000 contacts - built over 15 years - sat in HubSpot with no confidence in their accuracy. Current job titles, company affiliations, and LinkedIn profiles were largely out of date. The CEO knew many of these contacts personally, but no system existed to validate which ones were still relevant, which had moved on, and which could be approached for a new fundraise. Manual enrichment by the internal team had covered a fraction of the database over two years of work.
With a new product raise on the horizon, the team needed to answer a specific question: of these 7,000 contacts, which ones are family offices, where are they now, and are their details accurate enough to reach out?
The secondary challenge: accuracy mattered more than coverage. Valiance's network is relationship-driven - the CEO reaches out personally, not through email campaigns. An incorrectly matched LinkedIn profile or a wrong company affiliation would create more problems than leaving a contact unenriched.
Our Approach
Novlini delivered the engagement in two phases.
Phase 1 - Clay Enrichment with Guardrails
The core problem with standard AI enrichment tools - as Valiance had already tested with HubSpot's native enrichment - is that they always return a result, even when no reliable match exists. A wrong LinkedIn profile is worse than no profile.
Novlini built a Clay enrichment workflow with explicit precision guardrails: LinkedIn matching triggered by name and known company, with a minimum confidence threshold before any data is written back. Records where no high-confidence match was found were flagged for manual review rather than populated with uncertain data. The output was a cleaned CSV with enriched profiles (current company, job title, LinkedIn URL, city, country) for the portion of the database where Clay could find reliable matches.
The enrichment covered the fields Valiance actually needed for their fundraising process: current employer, function, geography, and LinkedIn - not email addresses or phone numbers, which the team preferred to source through personal channels.
Records without a LinkedIn presence - a significant subset, given that many of Valiance's most senior contacts are HNW individuals who do not maintain public profiles - were flagged separately rather than left enriched with incorrect data.
Phase 2 - HubSpot to Attio Migration
With the enrichment complete and the database cleaned, Valiance moved forward with the migration to Attio. The motivation: Attio's relationship management model - Gmail sync, interaction tracking, and shared team visibility - is a better fit for a small team managing a relationship-driven investor outreach process than HubSpot's sales-focused interface.
Full migration of cleaned contacts and companies from HubSpot into Attio. Investor categories applied as custom attributes (family office, private bank, institutional investor, service provider) to enable list filtering for targeted outreach. Gmail sync activated, giving the team shared visibility on all investor communications in a single place.
A Beehiiv integration configured for the quarterly newsletter workflow - Attio handles the relationship layer, Beehiiv handles the mass communications, keeping the CRM clean and focused on relationship management.
Technology Stack
Clay - contact enrichment with precision guardrails
Attio - investor relationship management, Gmail sync, categorized contact database (replaces HubSpot)
Beehiiv - investor newsletter and portfolio updates
The Results
Valiance went from a 15-year-old contact database with no reliable enrichment to a structured, categorized investor CRM ready for active fundraising outreach.
7,000-contact database enriched with precision - LinkedIn profiles, current employers, and geography updated where Clay could find a high-confidence match; uncertain records flagged rather than incorrectly populated
Investor categories structured - family offices, private banks, and institutional investors filterable in a single view for targeted fundraising outreach
HubSpot retired - full migration to Attio with Gmail sync and shared team visibility
Newsletter workflow separated from CRM - Beehiiv handles mass communications, Attio stays focused on relationship management
CEO-ready database - enriched contacts reviewed and validated before any outreach, matching the firm's relationship-first approach
Why It Matters
For investment firms with relationship-driven fundraising, the contact database is the most valuable asset the firm has - and the hardest to maintain. Standard AI enrichment tools optimize for coverage, not precision. For a firm where the CEO reaches out personally and an incorrect job title or company creates an awkward conversation, precision is not optional.
The right approach to enriching a legacy investor database is to treat accuracy as a hard constraint: enrich confidently or flag for review, never populate with noise. Combined with a CRM migration that gives the whole team visibility on investor communications, this is what makes a 15-year relationship network actually usable for the next capital raise.