A two-person fund does not need enterprise software. It needs five things that talk to each other: a deal CRM, a document store, an LP record, a portfolio tracker and a way to send reports. Buy those, and resist everything else until a real bottleneck appears.
The five layers
- Deal CRM - pipeline stages, sourcing attribution, meeting notes, and follow-up reminders.
- Data room and document store - one structured repository for diligence, signed documents and board packs.
- LP CRM and reporting - commitments, capital accounts, notices, and a portal or a disciplined email cadence.
- Portfolio monitoring - a standard monthly metric template collected from every company.
- Fund accounting - usually owned by the administrator; you need read access, not a licence.
Selection principles
- Prefer one tool that does 80% of two jobs over two tools that need syncing.
- Own your data: exportability matters more than features on a five-year horizon.
- Do not buy an LP portal before you have twenty LPs; a well-formatted quarterly PDF outperforms an empty portal.
- Standardise the portfolio metric template before choosing a monitoring tool - the template is the hard part.
First-year budget
- CRM: ₹0–1.5 lakh a year for a two-person team.
- Document store and e-signature: ₹0.5–1.5 lakh a year.
- Portfolio monitoring: ₹0–3 lakh a year; a spreadsheet is genuinely acceptable below 15 companies.
- Website, email and security tooling: ₹1–2 lakh a year.
- Total realistic spend: under ₹8 lakh a year before headcount.
Security baseline
- SSO and enforced two-factor authentication across every tool holding LP or portfolio data.
- Role-based access to the data room, reviewed when anyone leaves.
- Encrypted backups of signed documents held outside the primary vendor.
- A written incident response contact list, tested once a year.