Your tenant
Runs in Aligned's own cloud account, single tenant, under your SSO with permissions that mirror Affinity. If someone can't see a deal there, they can't see it here. What I build with you is yours to keep and run.
An unsolicited proposal by Steps Ventures. Not affiliated with or endorsed by Aligned Climate Capital. This page specifies one of the three nuisances end to end. The other two (IC memos, market sizing) and the live solar screen I walk through in a working session.
You track NDAs, data rooms, and deal stages in Affinity by hand. None of it should be typed by a person. Affinity has a full API, and every stage change throws off a machine-readable signal somewhere. Below is the whole thing: what it looks like running, the five stages, where your team steers it, the build plan, and how the data stays yours.
Affinity stays the system of record. Listeners on your e-sign tool, data room, email, and calendar write the right field through the Affinity API, each with a log entry. Nobody types a stage change. The example below is fictional deals in the real layout.
| Deal | Stage (set by software) | Days | Last signal | Action taken by the system |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Northlight Grid | IC memo | 2 | Memo draft v2 generated, linked in Affinity (Jul 1) | Partner review proposed for Thursday, invite sent |
| Meridian Thermal | Data room | 6 | Room viewed by 2 fund users (Jun 30) | Financial model missing from room, request sent Jun 30 |
| Fernbrook Systems | NDA out | 6 | NDA sent via e-sign Jun 26, still unsigned | Stalled 5 days, nudge 2 sent Jul 1, tone set for counsel |
| Loamworks | First meeting | 8 | Intro call ended Jun 24, summary filed to notes | Your call queued, NDA or pass, everything filed either way |
| Cobalt Freight | Passed | 12 | Pass email detected Jun 20, reason logged: too early | Re-engage trigger set on their next raise announcement |
Every field change carries its provenance: what fired, when, and what it wrote. No silent edits.
| When | Source | What happened |
|---|---|---|
| Jul 1, 9:14a | Memo pipeline | Northlight memo v2 finished. CRM stage set to IC memo, memo URL attached |
| Jul 1, 8:47a | Chase engine | Fernbrook nudge 2 sent, counsel tone. Thread checked first: no reply, no attachment, no meeting booked |
| Jun 30, 4:41p | Data-room webhook | Meridian room viewed by 2 users. Missing-doc check ran, model request sent |
| Jun 30, 8:00a | Daily digest | Sent to the team: 9 actions taken, 2 stalls escalated, 1 decision waiting |
| Jun 26, 11:03a | E-sign webhook | Fernbrook NDA sent. Stage moved First meeting to NDA out |
Every deal walks the same five stages. Each one is a place a person is doing clerical work today, and each has a documented API that removes it. Nothing exotic.
An associate finds the template, fills in the counterparty, sends it from the e-sign tool, then remembers, or forgets, to note it in Affinity. About 25 minutes of clerical work per deal.
When a deal hits the NDA stage in Affinity, or on one click, the fund's template is pre-filled from the Affinity record and sent under the associate's own name. The envelope ID and status write back automatically.
Someone has to remember to check, write the polite nudge, then the firmer one. Follow-up number three is where deals quietly die.
Webhooks report sent, viewed, and signed in real time. Unsigned at day 3, a nudge goes out after the checks in section 03. Day 7, a firmer one, and the stall escalates in the digest. Every touch logs to Affinity.
The countersigned PDF sits in someone's inbox. Filing it, flipping the stage, and requesting room access each wait on a human noticing.
The signed webhook files the executed NDA to the deal record and Drive, flips the stage, and sends the access request the same minute.
An associate clicks through folders building a mental index. The missing financial model gets noticed on day 4, an awkward day to ask for it.
The room is crawled the hour access lands. Documents are read and classified against your diligence checklist, so a found-vs-missing list exists on day one and the missing-document request has already gone out.
The first real pass is 4 to 8 hours of reading, and the output lives in one person's head until the memo gets written.
Structured extraction: revenue, burn, runway, cap table, and contract red flags (change of control, exclusivity, MFN). Every extracted number links to its source page, and it feeds the memo pipeline. You can ask the room questions in plain English with cited answers.
The design goal is zero required human involvement, with intervention always one click away. The failure mode to design out is the confident robot: nagging someone who already replied, or reverting a field a person just fixed. Five rules prevent it.
| When | What happens | What you provide |
|---|---|---|
| Week 1 | Keys and mapping. Affinity lists, fields, and stages mapped. E-sign connected, template fielded. One live deal runs in shadow mode: the software watches and logs while your team works by hand, which baselines your real manual hours. | A read-only Affinity API key, the NDA template, 30 minutes with whoever owns the pipeline |
| Week 2 | The NDA loop goes live and fully automatic: sends, chasing, filing, stage moves, morning digest. First week where nobody touches any of it. | Affinity write access. Optionally hold any signal in draft mode to start |
| Weeks 3 to 4 | Data room: crawl, checklist classification, missing-doc list on one live room. Then extraction wired into the memo pipeline. | Access to one active data room and your diligence checklist |
| Ongoing | Runs in your own cloud tenant, single tenant, provenance log on every write. New signals added as they prove out. | Nothing day to day. The digest is a report, not a to-do list |
On a pipeline of roughly 120 NDAs and 40 data rooms a year, this returns on the order of 440 associate hours, about eleven weeks. Those volumes are your numbers to set, and week one measures the real baseline before anything is promised. The larger win is cycle time and dropped balls: the NDA nobody chased, the room nobody indexed until Thursday, the field that was three weeks stale when a partner asked. Those cost deals, not hours.
Runs in Aligned's own cloud account, single tenant, under your SSO with permissions that mirror Affinity. If someone can't see a deal there, they can't see it here. What I build with you is yours to keep and run.
Each connector gets the narrowest scope that works: the e-sign key manages envelopes only, the Affinity key sees only the pipeline lists, data-room access is read-only. Keys live in the cloud secret manager, never in code.
Every automated write carries who, what, when, and why in an append-only log, the trail an auditor or LP would ask for. Documents stay in your tenant and never train any model.
Affinity stays the front end, the digest arrives in email or Slack, and this runs as plumbing underneath. Nothing to migrate to, nothing for the team to learn.