We keep a directory of 326 tools that private equity and venture firms run on, tagged by where in the firm each one sits and what it plugs into. Counting them produces a picture of the market that does not match how it gets talked about.
The market builds for the middle of a fund's life, not the top
Sorted by what each tool is for:
| Use case | Tools |
|---|---|
| Portfolio monitoring | 161 |
| Deal sourcing | 133 |
| Fundraising | 126 |
| Screening | 125 |
| Investor relations | 117 |
| Reporting | 115 |
| Back office | 86 |
Sourcing gets the conferences and the pitch decks. Monitoring gets the most software. More tools are built for the years after a cheque clears than for the months before it, which is a reasonable read of where the unglamorous, repeatable work actually sits.
By office, 219 tools serve the front office, 164 the middle and 100 the back. Forty-eight claim all three, which is usually a platform pitch rather than three products.
Two-thirds do not publish what they connect to
215 of the 326 list no integrations at all. Of the 111 that do, the named systems cluster tightly:
| Integration | Tools naming it |
|---|---|
| Salesforce | 31 |
| Preqin | 23 |
| Crunchbase | 17 |
| PitchBook | 16 |
| Bloomberg | 14 |
| Dropbox | 14 |
This is the part that costs money after you sign. A tool that does not say what it connects to is a tool whose data you will move by hand, or pay someone to move. When we evaluate anything for our own stack, the integration list is the first thing we ask for and the most common thing a vendor cannot produce.
Ninety-two tools do exactly one thing
Counting how many use cases each tool covers:
| Use cases covered | Tools |
|---|---|
| One | 92 |
| Two | 59 |
| Three | 46 |
| Four to five | 55 |
| Six or seven | 42 |
The split is real: a long tail of single-purpose tools against 42 that claim to cover almost everything a fund does. Sixty tools cover both sourcing and portfolio monitoring, which is the combination worth looking at closely — the same system holding the company before and after investment is what keeps a portfolio review honest.
What we do with this ourselves
Three rules we apply before adding anything:
- Ask what it replaces, not what it adds. A stack of 92 single-purpose tools is how a small team ends up spending its week in software administration.
- Make the vendor name the integrations before the demo. Two-thirds cannot. That is not disqualifying, but it tells you who is moving the data.
- Buy for the stage you are in. Monitoring tools are the largest category because most firms need them eventually. A first-fund manager does not need one yet, and the sourcing tool they skipped is the one that would have paid for itself.
Method: 326 tools in the 2080 directory, tagged by office function, use case and named integrations as published by each vendor. Placeholder rows were excluded, and a tool that lists no integration is counted as not publishing one rather than as having none. Browse the directory with these filters at /pe-tools-stack.