Building the ‘Silicon Valley’ of Europe

For years, the road to startup success was thought to begin and end in Silicon Valley. But in the early 2000s, well ahead of their time, a small team of entrepreneurs set out to prove otherwise. 

With the right mix of talent, capital, and community, why shouldn’t Europe rival the US? 

The team saw this untapped potential as an opportunity to reshape the future of global technology. In 2007, they launched Seedcamp, a powerful network that nurtures European founders as they fundraise, collaborate, and scale. 

“We back exceptional founders and help them build something meaningful,” shares Miguel Pinho, Head of Technology. “First, we provide funding, and then we connect them with the right experts, partners, and investors from our network to enable them to achieve their ambitions.” 

As Seedcamp gained recognition, the team scaled to support over 500 global powerhouses, with a portfolio including publicly listed companies like UiPath and Wise, and unicorns like Revolut and Synthesia.

“Over the years, we’ve scaled with incredible founders, backed now well-known companies, and seen some wild journeys,” says Miguel. “Having a front-row seat to all of this has been incredible.”

A journey through suboptimal CRMs

In 2015, Miguel joined the team to build the processes and tech stack critical to enabling Seedcamp’s growth. 

“Our previous stack was a nightmare: there were very few tools designed specifically for VCs at the time. With such a small team, it’s vital that we run our operations as efficiently as possible,” says Miguel.

“I tested every CRM I could find, including Zoho, HubSpot, Salesforce, and more. None provided the balance of flexibility and power we needed, and most were designed for larger teams with more resources."

Eventually, Seedcamp settled for a makeshift setup. “We started using Airtable as a temporary solution,” recalls Miguel. “It allowed us to build databases, but we knew the lack of deep integrations with some of our key tools like Google Workspace, meant it wouldn’t be enough in the long term.”

In 2023, Seedcamp realized it was time for something custom-built. “We spent months evaluating modern solutions like Affinity and Zoho, but in the end, Attio stuck out. Now, we’ve been customers for over a year.” 

The Attio moment 

Miguel first met Attio’s co-founder, Nicolas Sharp, in 2017. “We talked a lot about building the perfect VC tool stack, so I’ve been following Attio’s journey since the beginning.”

When the time came to choose a CRM, Attio’s powerful API-first structure and intuitive flexibility made it the clear winner. 

“We saw the value immediately. Before Attio, we'd have to ask each other so many time-consuming questions. Now, with such a powerful data model and sleek UI, we can find what we need without disrupting our workflows.”

The Seedcamp team were also impressed by Attio’s unmatched customer support.

"Right from the outset we've felt so supported by the team – all the way through discovery, onboarding, and then ongoing customer support. Whenever I have a question, there's always a human I can reach out to,” says Miguel. 

“But most of all, the Attio team treats customers as people. That’s extremely rare in the world of CRM.”

How Seedcamp uses Attio 

Attio is the core platform upon which Seedcamp manages its deal flow. Using lists, custom objects, workflows, and the Attio API, Miguel has built a powerful CRM tailored to their unique business model.

“At Seedcamp, we're very careful with the founder's journey, so it’s crucial that our CRM helps us to drive that personalized experience. Attio enables us to do exactly that.” 

Leveraging custom objects to build a bespoke data model

For Seedcamp, data visibility is extremely important. “We visualize our deal flow in separate phases. Very few CRMs allow us to represent our unique approach without compromising visibility or efficiency, but with Attio it was easy.”

Using Attio’s powerful data model, Seedcamp has built multiple custom objects that mirror precisely how the team operates. 

“Building this way in Attio has dramatically improved our investment processes and given us much better visibility over what’s in the pipeline, allowing the team to focus on important tasks, instead of manual, repetitive processes.”

Miguel is excited that, with Attio, Seedcamp can continue to adapt these approaches if necessary in future.

“Attio’s data model is incredibly flexible and easy to experiment with to extend its functionality. We’re even trialing a custom object for Investors to track Companies, People records, or both, all in one place.”

Optimizing the deal flow engine

With such a unique data model, Seedcamp needed to automate the repetitive tasks of their pipeline management to ensure the right records were moved between stages at the right time. 

Miguel uses Attio’s powerful Automations feature to achieve this. “We built workflows to migrate our records between our custom objects so that whenever a specific criteria is met, it automatically creates or updates another record.”

These automations have had an immense impact on the team’s productivity. That way, Seedcamp can prioritize higher-value tasks.

“Although on the surface each workflow saves only a few seconds, the compounding effect of running them repeatedly is vast – we’re saving hours, even days, every month.” 

Miguel also uses the Zapier integration to build additional automations between Attio and the rest of Seedcamp’s stack. 

“We’ve configured a number of automations which create tasks for the team to update data in Attio, or sync data between other platforms into an Attio list. It’s made our processes so much more efficient.”

Creating a source of truth using the Attio API

Recognizing the challenges the team faced in finding the data needed to work efficiently, Seedcamp has leveraged the Attio API to create tools that optimize these processes.

 “We built a custom browser extension to pull data from Typeform, Airtable and Attio into one place, so the team can access all the context they need without manually switching between different tools.”

“The flexibility of the API and intuitive documentation made it easy to build and customize a tool which acts as a natural extension of our existing workflows. The whole team loves it because they have easy access to the critical information they need – it works like magic.” 

Building further with Attio

“It’s amazing to see how much progress we’ve made in just a year of using Attio. Even the team members that don’t use the interface as much still contribute to the shared knowledge base – it truly is a source of truth for the whole team.”

Seedcamp is empowered to build anything they need on top of the platform, and are looking forward to adding more automations and integrations to further optimize their processes, enabling their team to focus on more impactful tasks.

“I’ve spent years working with CRMs, and tested more tools than I can count. Although I believe everyone should go through their own journey to choose a CRM, I’ve still recommended Attio to friends, colleagues, and even at VC conferences,” says Miguel. 

“We’ve had such a positive experience that I would tell everyone to explore Attio, regardless of your business model – it’s an incredible product.”