2021 VC Tech Stack
Since landing in venture capital back in January 2015 I have learned a lot about building up an organization's tech stack. A big part of my role as the Head of Technology at Seedcamp is to ensure we use the best combination of tools available in the market to execute on our mission of finding and supporting Europe’s most exceptional founders while taking into consideration all our specific requirements and constraints (financial, team, portfolio size, time, legacy systems, company culture, etc.). I, therefore, am a firm believer that there is no one stack that solves everything for everyone. Experimentation is part of the journey and selecting what composes your tech stack is probably one of the most impactful activities you can take at your company — using the right tool combination translates into substantial productivity gains across the whole team.
I have always kept an eye on what was being published on this VC tech space and have read many great articles including this one from Eze Vidra on The European VC Tech Stack 2019, the one from Jean de La Rochebrochard about How things work at Kima Ventures also from early 2019, a few from the Point Nine team who have publicly shared their stack over the years (2012 by Christoph Janz, 2014 by Nicolas Wittenborn and 2017 by Christoph Janz), this more recent one from Vedika Jain from the Weekend Fund about their stack as a $10M Fund and many more articles.
The inception
The first VC Tech Stack report dates back to 2019 — when the first EU VC Platform Summit was held with 50 platform leaders from funds across Europe participating and I was invited to be part of a panel to discuss tools we used and I decided to take the opportunity to launch a survey that would help us all better understand the tools in the market and what other funds use.
The result was the first edition of the report — the 2020 edition which at the time was mostly shared with the European VC Platform community. On my end, beyond the insights on the tools used, this first pilot edition also helped me understand how some questions could be polished, some tools were missing, and quite a few overall improvements. Plus, the feedback was very positive so I was keen to give it another go in 2021!
The report
This year the survey had 22 questions about tools and listed 212 different tech solutions — 30 of which were new entries for the 2021 report. There were 21 responses and the final result is the 38-page report you can see below which includes insights on most of the questions, identifies changes when compared to the 2020 edition, and highlights other key takeaways.
In case you are interested in the previous edition from 2020 have a look here.
The tools
VC Tech Stack — Landscape
The landscape image you can see below gives you a quick overview of the tools being used — please note that this only includes the solutions that are actually used by the respondents and not all the tools available.
Link to the high definition image
2021 Tool List
The list below is a filterable Airtable list with the 212 tools available as an option when the survey went live in February 2021.
View the complete tool list here on Airtable!
While this list is long, it doesn’t include every tool under the sun. So, if I missed any key ones please let me know via email or Twitter.
The future
Creating this report is a lot of work, but I do enjoy it and believe it’s very very likely I’ll do another edition in 2021 — with small improvements but mainly with an expanded reach in terms of the number of respondents and geographical focus.
I also felt that creating a “home” for these reports would simplify things in the long run so I have created VCTechStack.com — to host this report as well as previous editions, a curated list of articles in this space, and a few more key resources I will be adding over time!
If you’ve found this report useful, please clap it, tweet it, share it internally or with friends that may also get value from it! :)
Also, please let me know if you have any questions, comments, or improvement ideas for future editions.
Finally, if you work on this space and going forward, you are keen to be involved in this report or related initiatives, then please drop me an email at miguel@seedcamp.com or message me on twitter.com/megafu :)
Shameless plug: if you are a founder looking for funding — Seedcamp is here for you → seedcamp.com/looking-for-funding/
