G2 Venture Partners is a venture capital firm of 10 to 20 people, backing companies building a sustainable future.
As with any VC firm, relationships are the key to their business. They preferred HubSpot as a CRM, but used Affinity solely for its superior Google Workspace integration which gives them insight into their relationships with other companies.
The problem: they were paying over $50,000 a year for that primary feature.
We built them a replacement that allows them to own their own data, and get the same privacy-respecting relational intelligence they liked about Affinity without the price tag.
Scroll to see how it works.
What G2 used Affinity for
G2 already used HubSpot for deals and portfolio tracking. In their words, they kept Affinity to “search a domain and see if anyone on the team has ever emailed someone there.”
One team member called Affinity “overpowered for what we use it for.”
What the new platform stores
Partners didn’t want their full inboxes copied into a shared system. The platform only asks Gmail for each message’s sender, recipients, date, and subject. Gmail’s API has a metadata-only mode that returns those headers and leaves the body out, so message bodies stay in Gmail. We also discard the short preview line Gmail attaches to each message.
We also integrated their calendars to see who they’ve met with in the past, without exposing agendas or notes.
Asking from Claude
G2’s partners already worked in Claude every day, and that’s where they really wanted to ask “who do we know at X?” We built an MCP that allows anyone within their Google Workspace to get authorized access to that information.
Partners can ask by company name. Claude looks up the company’s web domain in PitchBook first, then runs the search.
What Claude can find
For a company domain, the search returns the people there the team has emailed or met, the teammates who have been in touch, interaction counts for each, and the date of the most recent contact.
It covers all team mailboxes and calendars, going back 16 years.
Why MCP?
There’s lots of ways to build a tool like this. We chose to expose it as an MCP server and API to serve the use-cases of the team without adding another platform to look at.
MCP servers are supported by almost every AI agent platform, so a team who is aggressively adopting AI can use the new tool where they’re actually working throughout the day. It also means their AI agents can make smarter relationship decisions on their own.
The REST API was created separately to easily integrate the tool with their existing platforms in code.
Integration with the G2 ecosystem
In addition to the MCP, G2’s Bubble app and its internal OS system read the same data through an API.
An admin dashboard shows each person’s connection status, import progress, and sync health. We delivered it with a user manual and admin manual.
Importing 16 years of email
We imported the full history of all 15 mailboxes, going back 16 years. The largest held about 230,000 to 240,000 messages each. We used heuristics to avoid importing useless noise like newsletters and spam.
The import ran newest first, so each person’s recent mail was searchable within minutes of connecting while older years filled in behind it.
The hard part was keeping an import that ran for months from stalling. After initial delivery of the working system, we continued to iterate on the import until it successfully imported the data. That’s the part of the project that usually ends in failure when clients try to DIY their way to a successful outcome.
What our client said about working with us
The team calls the platform G2 Connections.
“G2 Connections is how our busy, distributed team stays on the same page.”Jake Tauscher, Partner at G2 Venture Partners
Nuance takes direction, prioritizes it and works independently while asking critical questions where necessary. Nuance has quickly and cost-effectively delivered an outstanding product while requiring little of our team's time. Our experience could not have been more positive. We strongly recommend Nuance to anyone considering outsourced development support.
For firms paying tens of thousands per year for software
You don’t need to rebuild your entire software stack, nor should you try. But most companies have at least a few tools that cost much more than they really should. For VC firms, that’s often a CRM like Affinity, Attio, or HubSpot.
If you’re paying big $$$ for a tool that you’re only using a fraction of, we can help you build your own IP that solves the problem exactly the way you need for a fraction of your yearly subscription.
It’s not just about savings. It’s about making software that actually works the way you need it to without being tied to an enterprise contract.