The Top VC Tech Stack Tools in 2025

TLDR: Establishing a truly VC-first tech stack can be difficult. We break down best software for portfolio monitoring, deal management, lead generation, note-taking, and valuations.

Venture capital firms are increasingly turning to specialized tools to manage portfolios, streamline workflows, and make better investment decisions. From sourcing deals to managing portfolio data, the right software stack can create meaningful operational lift.

Below, we break down the top tools for VC firms across five categories, tools optimized for performance, time-saving automations, AI-integrations, and firm-founder collaboration.

1. Best Portfolio Monitoring Platform: Standard Metrics

Standard Metrics is the go-to platform for VC portfolio monitoring and real-time performance tracking and reporting, enabling better collaboration between VC teams and their portfolio companies.

Standard Metrics’ highly-accurate AI agent and managed data services team parse and deliver historical data and new metrics directly into the platform. These metrics are then structured, traceable to source documents, and can be easily reviewed with the platform’s natural language, AI portfolio company analyst. Standard Metrics also offers institutional grade tear sheets and reporting templates to give stakeholders a clear line of sight into portfolio health and answer LP questions faster. Focused on multi-platform interoperability, Standard Metrics helps you export on-platform data into Excel, examine data on-platform via the tool’s AI-powered embedded BI, or export your dashboard for use in other BI tools.

More than 100 VC firms like Bessemer Venture Partners, General Catalyst, and Lux Capital use Standard Metrics to track data for over 9,000 portfolio companies. With features like Global Benchmarking to compare your portfolio performance to other companies in the private markets, the platform enables better decisions without manual overhead.

Why it’s #1:

• Real-time portfolio data
• Automated, AI-driven financial data parsing
• Portfolio benchmarking by sector and revenue
• Streamlined LP reporting
• Interactive dashboards and strong BI analysis capabilities
• Automated investor reporting
• Better collaboration between companies and their investors

2. Best Deal Management CRM: Affinity

Affinity is the top relationship intelligence CRM for VC firms. It automatically tracks conversations, meetings, and intros across the entire team. For firms that source heavily via referrals, warm intros, and founder networks, Affinity turns those interactions into usable data.

Why it’s #1:

• Automated contact syncing and deal tracking
• Relationship strength scoring
• Collaborative pipeline views

3. Best Lead Sourcing Tool: Harmonic

Harmonic is built for startup lead generation. It crawls the web to identify early-stage startups before they appear in databases like PitchBook or Crunchbase. VCs can search by founder history, headcount growth, product category, or stealth signals.

Why it’s #1:

• Real-time startup alerts
• Deep filtering by geography, vertical, and hiring trends
• Designed for early-stage sourcing

4. Best Meeting Notes Tool for VCs: Granola

Granola is a note-taking tool that records your calls, generates structured notes, and gives your firm a searchable record of every conversation, without anyone needing to type.

Granola is built around real workflows (like founder pitches, partner meetings, and diligence calls). It automatically captures decisions, action items, and next steps, and organizes them by company, contact, and topic. Everything is shareable, searchable, and AI-summarized.

VCs use Granola to keep their firms aligned and avoid losing context between calls. Whether you’re in back-to-back pitch meetings or prepping for IC, Granola makes sure nothing slips.

Why it’s #1:

• Structured, AI-generated summaries for every call
• Notes link directly to companies, people, and pipeline
• Search by topic, meeting, or action item across your firm

5. Best Valuation Software: Derivatas

Derivatas is the top tool for venture-backed portfolio valuations. It handles ASC 820 compliance, waterfall modeling, and valuation reviews. Via direct integration with other tools like Standard Metrics, it syncs portfolio data and financials without manual entry.

Why it’s #1:

• Built specifically for VC valuation workflows
• Direct integration with portfolio data platforms
• Quarterly reporting made faster and audit-ready

Final Thoughts: Building a Modern VC Software Stack

The best VC tech stacks in 2025 focus on automated, VC-first, and collaborative tools. From portfolio monitoring tools like Standard Metrics to lead generation platforms like Harmonic, these solutions reduce friction across the fund lifecycle.

Whether you’re raising a new fund or scaling operations across multiple geographies, the software above will keep your team focused on strategy instead of spreadsheets.

We’ve collaborated with Hayley Barna, Partner at First Round Capital, to bring you a template for working sessions with your investor. Find a white board, download her template, and get to work clearing your company’s largest roadblock!

Access Hayley’s template

Sometimes a board deck just doesn’t cut it

Board meetings are a critical tool for founders to solve business problems, and we’re excited to help the founder community explore this important topic with tools and content at Quaestor. Over the past couple of months, we have shared a collection of three board deck templates from Joe Lonsdale, Nabeel Hyatt, and David Sacks in an effort to codify best practices for board meetings and bridge the knowledge gap between investors and founders. You can check them out here.

Despite the positive reaction to these templates, we’re well aware that there is no one-size-fits-all solution to investor collaboration. After we published these last three board deck templates, some of the top entrepreneurs and investors we know told us they swear by a different approach and often don’t use decks at all with their investors. We couldn’t help but learn more and go down the rabbit hole.

Today we are excited to introduce our exploration into board deck alternatives. First, let’s dive into why board decks might not be right for your company in every situation.

Board meetings are often referred to as “the most valuable meeting each quarter.” Every team member wants a seat at the table, and for investors, becoming a board member for the first time is a critical career milestone. This framing oftentimes results in a dog and pony show that doesn’t provide value to the executive team or the board members. Jeff Bonforte, CEO of Grindr and former CEO of Xobni perhaps put it best in an article for First Round Review:

“Board meetings are long, grueling, and hard to focus. It’s nearly impossible to capture your company’s story accurately when you’re obligated to only talk about certain things, i.e. how money’s getting spent. Too many boards are too big, and too many board members invite observers and general hangers on – all who want to chime in with something to sound smart.”

Additionally, board meetings merit different goals and outcomes depending on the current stage of your business. The traditional meticulous preparing of slides and walk through of all aspects of the business, from sales to marketing to metrics to operations, can often not be the right strategy for early stage companies. Similarly, a laser focus on urgent tactical items isn’t as relevant for later stage board meetings. As companies eventually progress to post-IPO, the board meetings change yet again, involving a greater focus on governance and far less control on the founder side.

Simply put, if what you really want is an intense discussion with your investors to solve a major problem, sometimes the traditional board meeting + deck doesn’t do the trick. It prevents you from sharing the same level of detail as you could through thoughtful prose and focused discussion, tends to spread the meeting thin across many topics and people, and it requires a level of design effort that may distract from more pressing priorities.

There’s another path — and Standard Metrics is here to help

We’re excited to explore alternatives, which we jokingly refer to as “anti-board deck” board decks, and share our learnings with the founder community. The natural question: if not board decks, then what?

As a first step, we’ve partnered with Hayley Barna — co-Founder of Birchbox and current Partner at First Round Capital, where she leads investments in seed stage consumer companies — to unveil the importance of board working sessions and why she views investors at the seed stage as “the kick in the ass when you need it most.”

Hayley believes in the power of tactical board working sessions at the earliest stages. The key benefit of these sessions is their ability to facilitate open, genuine conversation rather than posturing on both sides. Building a company is a team sport, and these sessions are in service to the entrepreneur and the problems they and their company are currently facing.

A few highlights of Hayley’s approach:

1. This is a collaborative conversation to clear a roadblock, not a standing meeting
2. Pre-load your investors with relevant context via an email beforehand
3. Choose a single success metric for the working session up front
4. Don’t “spin” any details – pulling punches will reduce the value of the conversation

If what you truly need is a “kick in the ass,” don’t spend hours preparing for an upcoming quarterly board meeting that won’t move the needle. Rather, collaborate immediately with your investors to clear roadblocks and maximize engagement with your brain trust.

Access Hayley’s template

We hope that what we shared today will continue empowering founders with the tools and insights they need to build the world-changing companies of tomorrow. Who would you want to hear from next? What other useful tools would you like us to build around investor relations and board management? Drop us a comment or feel free to reach out anytime with feedback. Check out the entire board deck template library here.

When we founded Standard Metrics, we used a classic startup “stack”: Gusto for payroll, Slack for communication, and Notion for documentation — standard tools that were recommended to us by peers. But after talking to hundreds of startup founders, we realized that no one’s created a standard for investor relations.

Board meetings in particular are an obvious mismatch of knowledge and experience. Investors have dozens or hundreds of board meetings under their belt, while first-time founders often don’t understand what’s expected of them and how they can best use the time together. Even experienced founders we spoke to were interested in learning about different styles for board management.

To start tackling this problem, we’ve teamed up with a group of world-class investors and operators to codify best practices for board meetings. What makes these investors special is that each of them previously founded companies like Palantir and Yammer. Now, they’re sharing their personal insights through example board decks you can download here:

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Joe Lonsdale: The 1 hour board meeting

Joe’s developed a unique perspective from 500+ board meetings both as a founder and investor. For companies from seed to pre-IPO stage, he’s sharing the best of what he’s learned from world-class entrepreneurs and investors.

Nabeel Hyatt: The OKR Driven Board Deck

Nabeel’s worked at scrappy small scale, in hyper-growth mode, and at large public company scale several times over the last couple decades as a CEO, COO, and head of product. He now spends time at Spark Capital partnering with ambitious founders.

 

David Sacks: The Sacks SaaS Board Deck

David Sacks is co-founder and general partner at Craft. He has been a successful tech entrepreneur and investor for two decades, building and investing in some of the most iconic companies of the last 20 years.

We’re collaborating with some other amazing investor/operators, and we’ll be publishing more soon. Who would you want to hear from next? What other useful tools would you like us to build around investor relations and board management? Drop us a comment or feel free to reach out anytime with feedback.

Access board decks