Ray Zhou
Co-Founder & CEO
Technology, Entrepreneur
San Francisco, CA, USA
Listen to Ray’s Podcast!
Ray Zhou, CEO of Affinity, believes every opportunity begins with a relationship—and knows that business networks become unwieldy and harder to leverage as they grow larger. In response, he co-founded Affinity, whose eponymous CRM captures and organizes “data exhaust” from emails and calendars, and combines it with other datasets to provide the “relationship intelligence” needed by decision-makers in venture capital, investment banking, private equity, and consulting: industries where relationship-building is foundational to deal-making.
A native of the Bay Area, Ray met Affinity’s co-founder, Shubham Goel, at Stanford, where they were studying computer science. Their goal is to bring relationship intelligence to the world at large.
Affinity’s website states:
Affinity helps private capital investors to find, manage, and close more deals. Affinity’s patented technology structures and analyzes millions of data points across emails, calendars, and third-party sources to offer users the tools they need to automatically manage their most valuable relationships, prioritize important connections, and discover untapped opportunities for investment. Affinity uses artificial intelligence to analyze relationship strength and illuminate the best paths to warm introductions. Founded in 2014, Affinity is headquartered in San Francisco, California. Affinity has raised $120M to date and is backed by leading investors including Menlo Ventures, Advance Venture Partners, 8VC and MassMutual Ventures.
Affinity has over 3,200 customers in 70 countries, including venture capital firms such as Bain Capital Ventures and Kleiner Perkins, private equity firms such as SoftBank Group, investment bankers such as Woodside Capital Partners, financial services firms such as Fidelity Investments, real estate companies such as Tishman Speyer, insurers such as American Family Insurance and enterprises such as Nike, Qualcomm and Twilio. Affinity has been named Fortune Magazine’s Best Workplaces, Inc. Magazine’s Best Workplaces and editor’s number one pick, the Data Breakthrough Award, BIG Innovation Award and others.
