What Affinity is genuinely good at
A CRM only earns trust if it's current, and the classic failure mode is well known: an analyst forgets to log a call, a partner's inbox has three months of context nobody transcribed, and by the time anyone checks the relationship graph it's already stale. Affinity's answer is to stop asking humans to do the logging. Email, calendar and meeting activity flow into records automatically, enrichment pulls in data from a range of external sources, and relationship-strength scoring turns raw activity into something a sourcing team can actually act on, a warm path to an intro instead of a cold outreach. That's a real product decision, well executed, and it's the reason the tool has stuck at firms like Bain Capital and Lightspeed. It's worth being clear about that before the critique: Affinity is good at the piece of deal work it set out to own.
AI reaching a pre-AI data model, versus built around one
Affinity's April 2026 hosted MCP server is a meaningful move, and Affinity now markets itself in AI-native terms. It connects ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Copilot directly to a firm's relationship graph, so a model can be asked "who at our firm knows someone at this target" and get a real answer. That's a fair addition and we'd credit it. The honest distinction is what the AI is reaching into. Affinity's data model, contacts, deals, relationship scores, was designed before the AI-native era, so its MCP points a model at a relationship-and-pipeline database. DealSage was built around AI from the start: the same relationship data sits in a whole-firm ontology alongside the documents, models and memos that produced it, every field carrying lineage back to its source, with agents and apps running on top. Ask a model "what did we assume in the last model on this sector" through DealSage and it can answer with the actual cell, not just the fact that a model exists somewhere. Bolting AI onto a legacy data model buys marginal gains around the edges; being built around one is a step change.
Moving over, on your own timetable
None of this means ripping Affinity out on day one. If you have thousands of records built up over many years, a migration can feel daunting, and that is a legitimate reason to take it in stages or to integrate rather than migrate first. DealSage reads from Affinity and can run alongside it, so you keep the CRM you know while the ontology captures everything around it, the documents, models, memos and email that Affinity was never built to hold. When you're ready, DealSage can migrate the relationship and pipeline record across in full and consolidate the stack onto one foundation. The direction is your call, not a rule we impose. See how the platform is built for the fuller picture.
Security, published plainly
Affinity's trust centre is genuinely thorough: SOC 2 Type 2, SOC 3, and ISO 27001, 27017, 27018 and 27701 certification are all verifiable on trust.affinity.co. What isn't published anywhere in that documentation is a VPC or on-premise deployment option, Affinity runs cloud-only. That's a reasonable choice for a relationship-graph product and won't matter to most firms. It matters more once the record in question includes unreleased models, board memos and diligence documents, which is why DealSage offers DealSage Cloud, a private VPC, or fully on-premise as an explicit choice rather than a single cloud path. Our own posture is verifiable the same way, at trust.dealsage.io.