The best fundraising CRM: Raised vs Affinity, Folk, Attio and Notion

You are eight weeks into the raise. Sixty investors live somewhere in a spreadsheet, four conversations you are fairly sure you owe an email, and one partner said "keep us posted" three weeks ago and has heard nothing since. The deck is on v11 and the runway number in your head is smaller than it was in June. The question is no longer whether you need a system. It is which one.

This is that comparison, written the way we would want to read one: what each tool is actually for, roughly where it sits on price, and who should pick it - including the cases where the honest answer is not us.

Raise smarter with Raised. The AI fundraising CRM for founders: pipeline, meetings, warm intros, updates and your documents in one place. One plan when you are ready, $39 a month or $299 a year.

Our bias, stated first

We build Raised. This page exists partly so you find it when you search for a fundraising CRM, and no amount of even-handed prose changes that. So here is the deal: we will describe what Affinity, Folk, Attio and Notion each do well, in plain terms, and we will tell you plainly when one of them is the better pick. Where we compare features, we compare against what those products publicly say they do. Where something is a judgement call, we say so. Pricing moves often in this category, so we talk in tiers rather than quoting numbers that will be wrong by the time you read them.

One more thing worth saying: a CRM does not raise the round. It stops the round leaking. The money is still raised in meetings, and no tool changes that.

The fast verdict: five tools, five different right answers

• You are a founder, mid-raise or about to be, and you want the fundraising work itself handled - the stages, the follow-ups, the intro paths, the updates, the deck: that is what Raised is for, and nothing else on this list is built for exactly that.
• You are a VC fund, or a team whose whole business is relationships at scale: Affinity. It is the category heavyweight for a reason, and it is priced for firms, not founders.
• You want one light, pleasant CRM for everything - sales, hiring, partnerships, and your raise on the side: Folk. It is a genuinely nice contact manager that does not pretend to be more.
• You are building a proper go-to-market machine and want the CRM you will still run two years after the raise: Attio. Flexible data model, modern, built for teams.
• You want to spend nothing and you already live in Notion: Notion, with a template. It works. We wrote a whole piece on where it stops working.

The rest of this page is the reasoning.

What a fundraising CRM actually has to do

Strip the category down and a raise makes five demands of whatever tool you run it in:

1. A pipeline with stages that mean something. Not "contacted-ish". Raised uses Lead → Contacted → Meeting Scheduled → In Diligence → Committed → Invested or Passed, and each stage has an entry condition.
2. An answer to "who do I spend this week on?" With 60 names, attention is the scarce resource, not names. This is tiering, and it should not depend on your memory.
3. Follow-ups that do not rely on you remembering. Most lost investor conversations are not lost in the meeting. They are lost ten days later, in silence.
4. A way in. Cold email works less well than an intro path through someone you both know - the warm intro question has its own piece.
5. The artefacts. The deck, the update you send monthly, eventually the term sheet you are trying to understand at 11pm.

General CRMs handle the first point and part of the third. The rest is where the category splits.

The five side by side

Configurable is doing a lot of work in that table. Almost anything can be configured into almost any CRM. The question is whether you want to spend a week of your raise being a CRM administrator.

Affinity: the one the investors themselves use

Affinity is relationship intelligence for firms whose entire business is a network: VC funds, private equity, investment banks. It reads the whole team's email and calendar, works out who actually knows whom and how warmly, and keeps that graph current without anyone doing data entry. For a fund tracking thousands of relationships across a partnership, it is genuinely excellent, and it is the incumbent in that world for a reason.

It is also enterprise-priced, sold per seat, and shaped around a firm's deal flow, not a founder's raise. There is no concept of the update you owe your investors, no deck, nothing that knows what a SAFE is from the founder's side of the table.

Pick Affinity if you are the fund. Genuinely - if you are reading this as an emerging manager tracking deal flow, Affinity or something like it is the right category and Raised is not. A founder raising a seed round buying Affinity is buying a combine harvester to mow a lawn.

Attio: the modern CRM you keep after the raise

Attio is the credible modern successor to the general-purpose CRM: fast, flexible data model, real-time collaboration, automations. Teams that outgrow spreadsheets and dislike legacy CRMs tend to love it. If you are building a sales motion, you will not regret learning it, and it will still be your CRM in three years.

For a raise specifically, it is a very good generic container. You will configure pipeline stages, build the tier field yourself, wire automations for follow-ups, and keep your deck and updates somewhere else. None of that is hard. All of it is time, and it produces a system that goes stale unless you maintain it - during the precise months you have the least slack of your life.

Pick Attio if the raise is one pipeline among several and you want one CRM for the company. Run the raise in it too if you like; it will be fine. Fine is the word, though.

Folk: the pleasant lightweight

Folk is a light, likeable contact manager: import contacts, group them, send sequenced emails, share pipelines with a small team. Agencies, communities and early teams use it for everything at once, and its pitch - a CRM that does not feel like homework - is fair. Of the general tools here it is the quickest to start and the cheapest to run.

The trade is depth. Fundraising in Folk is a pipeline template plus your own discipline: no tiering logic, no meeting analysis, no intro paths beyond shared contacts, nothing that knows a raise has a deadline. It is a rolodex with stages, done nicely.

Pick Folk if you want one simple CRM for sales, hiring and investors together and the raise is not the main event right now.

Notion: the free option, honestly assessed

You can absolutely run a raise in Notion. Thousands of founders have: a database, a kanban view, a template from Twitter. It costs nothing you are not already paying and it lives where your docs already live.

What it cannot do is act. Notion never notices that an investor has gone quiet for twelve days, never drafts the update, never tells you which twenty of your eighty names deserve this week. Every signal in a Notion raise is one you put there manually, which is exactly the work that stops happening in week six. The fuller argument is in Raised vs Notion for fundraising, and the spreadsheet version of it in Raised vs Airtable.

Pick Notion if you are pre-raise, testing the waters with ten conversations, or genuinely allergic to another subscription. At small scale it holds.

Where Raised sits

Raised is the only tool on this page built for the founder's side of a raise, and that shows up as defaults rather than configuration:

• The pipeline ships with the stages a raise actually has - Lead → Contacted → Meeting Scheduled → In Diligence → Committed → Invested or Passed - as a ranked list or a kanban.
• Tiers are automatic. An hourly job re-scores every investor into Tier 1 to 3 from stage, recency and momentum, so Monday morning starts with a list, not a scroll. How that works.
• Meetings get analysed. Import them from Google Calendar, log your notes or a transcript, and the AI returns a summary and a sentiment read - including what "great, keep us posted" usually means.
• Positive meeting, and a follow-up task appears on its own - "Send them an update", due in three days - because the follow-up is where rounds leak.
• Warm intro paths come from your imported LinkedIn network: who you know, who they know, and the shortest credible path to the partner you want.
• Updates are logged and AI-drafted from a date range of your actual activity. The monthly update deserves its own piece.
• The deck builder and term-sheet builder live inside, so the artefacts sit next to the pipeline they serve.
• One plan, $39 a month or $299 a year. No seats, no tiers, no sales call.

What Raised is not: a general CRM. When the round closes and you want a sales pipeline, use Attio or Folk and export your data out of Raised in full. We would rather be the best tool for six months of your life than a mediocre one for all of it.

If you are still sizing the round itself, the maths pages help before any CRM does: months of runway and your zero-cash date, how much to raise, and what the round costs in dilution at a given pre-money or SAFE cap. And the fundraising process guide walks the whole arc end to end.

How to choose in five minutes

Three questions settle it:

1. Is the raise the main event for the next six months? If no - Folk or Notion, move on. If yes, continue.
2. Are you the founder or the fund? Fund: Affinity. Founder: continue.
3. Do you want to build the system or use one? Build: Attio, configured your way. Use: Raised.

Whatever you pick, pick it before the raise starts, load enough investors into it, and let it hold the state your head should not.

Raise smarter with Raised. Import your network, load your pipeline, and see your tiers scored by tomorrow morning.

Best fundraising CRM: common questions

What is the best CRM for startup fundraising?

For a founder actively raising, a purpose-built tool like Raised covers the raise-specific work - stages, tiering, intro paths, updates, documents - without configuration. For a VC fund, Affinity is the standard. For a team that wants one general CRM beyond the raise, Attio or Folk are the strongest general picks.

Is Affinity worth it for founders?

Usually not. Affinity is excellent relationship intelligence, but it is built and priced for investment firms managing thousands of relationships across a team. A founder running one raise pays enterprise money for a fraction of the fit. It is the right tool on the other side of the table.

Can I just use Notion or a spreadsheet to track investors?

Yes, and at small scale it works. The failure mode is passivity: a Notion database or spreadsheet only knows what you type into it, so nothing flags the investor who went quiet or drafts the update you owe. Founder-reported experience, ours included, is that manual systems degrade somewhere around 40 investors - which is fewer than most rounds need.

How much does a fundraising CRM cost?

Raised is one plan at $39 a month or $299 a year. General CRMs like Folk and Attio sell per seat across free-to-mid tiers, and Affinity is enterprise software with pricing to match. Notion you likely already pay for.

Do I need a CRM for a pre-seed round?

If you are talking to fewer than about 20 investors, honestly, a spreadsheet can carry a pre-seed raise. Past that, the follow-up load is what breaks first, not the list itself. Our pipeline maths piece shows why most raises pass that line quickly.

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Raised is a fundraising CRM, not a law firm or a broker. Nothing on this page is legal, tax or investment advice. Take the round documents to a lawyer before you sign them.

Georgi, founder of Raised. He built it after running a raise out of a spreadsheet that fell over somewhere around investor number forty.