Arrows, a customer onboarding tool with a Madison-based co-founder, has raised $2.75 million to grow its team and scale its platform to be used by larger companies, according to a Tuesday announcement.
The funding comes from Gradient Ventures, Google's artificial intelligence (AI) venture fund, as well as 47 angel investors, including executives at companies such as Twitter Inc., GitHub Inc., Twilio Inc., Sprout Social Inc. and Trello, which is owned by Atlassian Corp. Plc.
Officially based in Los Angeles, Arrows was founded in July 2020 by Daniel Zarick, an early product manager at Twilio, and Benedict Fritz, who has a computer science degree from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and works out of the 100state co-working space in Madison.
Arrows is designed to make it easier for companies to onboard and collaborate with their customers through automated email reminders, due dates, assigned tasks and other features. It doesn't currently use AI but the company may utilize the technology as the product scales, Zarick said.
Gradient Ventures general partner Darian Shirazi first contacted Arrows in January but the startup wasn't looking to fundraise at that time, Zarick said. Shirazi reached out again in March after the Arrows platform publicly launched.
"Were were like, ‘We’re still not interested in raising money but if we were, we’d want it to be from someone who has been supportive of us,'" Zarick said. "I think he took that as a dare because over the next two weeks, he sent us nine of his portfolio companies for demos," Zarick said.
A couple of Gradient's portfolio companies became Arrows' early clients, Zarick said. Soon after that, Zarick and Fritz separately decided to explore fundraising and reached out to Shirazi to set up a call with the Gradient team.
"We talked to them at 10 a.m. and by the end of that first day, we had a term sheet," Zarick said.
The funding will go toward building the Arrows team and adding new features to the platform, including a Slack integration, deeper Salesforce integration and an option for clients to white-label the Arrows platform and brand it as their own.
“Arrows is tackling one of the most common, yet underdeveloped and unacknowledged aspects of working with new customers: onboarding," Shirazi said in a statement. "(Customer relationship management) only goes so far to track and ensure customer satisfaction and companies of all types are looking for ways to improve first impressions with new customers.”
Arrows currently has five employees and is hiring two more software engineers, Zarick said. Although the company runs a remote-first team, Fritz envisions eventually having a small Wisconsin-based team, he said.
Arrows' angel investors include former Twitter product head Jason Goldman, GitHub chief technology officer Jason Warner, Twilio CEO Jeff Lawson, Sprout Social CEO Justyn Howard and Trello CEO Michael Pryor.
