Arbol was founded in 2020 by first-generation, minority college students who’d gone on to successful careers in corporate banking and startups. Those founders wanted to build something that reflected their own experience, driving financially vulnerable college students toward brighter futures. Arbol realized that retention is an intractable problem that costs U.S. colleges billions each year, with no effective solution that proactively keeps students in college. So they built a cutting-edge platform that gives college officials their first real-time insight into students’ financial situations, paired with the first financial wellness solution built specifically for college students. Arbol is now launching with a handful of early adopters as it plans for major growth.
When Arbol was raising its pre-seed round in summer 2023, it turned to Finta. The $1 million round includes contributions from the Western New York Impact Investment Fund, University at Buffalo, Buffalo Angels, New York Ventures and a group of angel investors.
Why Arbol Turned To Finta to Fundraise?
As Arbol CEO David Gonzalez explains it, raising a pre-seed round is a rigorous process, involving hundreds of pitches to individuals and groups across the country. It’s time-consuming just to make the pitches, let alone to manage the status of a hundred conversations happening all at once. Dave – who worked in operations at top banks such as HSBC USA and M&T Bank and also raised seed and Series A rounds as a vice president at startup Kangarootime – said:
"Finta is by far the cleanest and most intuitive CRM for high-growth founders."
“I’ve used all the market-leading CRMs for startup companies, and Finta easily outperforms them in performance and reliability,” he says. “Additionally, Finta’s unique model unearths opportunities with potential investors that we wouldn’t have found anywhere else.”
Some of the things Dave liked:
- Arbol was able to quickly upload its information onto the Finta platform, and then to use the platform to engage investors with a single shareable link.
- Finta is a holistic CRM that eliminates the need for a patchwork of software tools, giving Arbol the opportunity to manage the entire process from one place.
- Finta has next-level automation tools, tracking Arbol’s relationships with prospective investors. Finta’s customized dashboard tracks the company’s engagement with those investors, down to how many times specific documents have been downloaded.
“That level of transparency allowed us to iterate on the fly, tracking what was working in our ongoing conversations with investors and leaning into those insights,” Gonzalez said. “We had a highly successful fundraise and we can’t wait to continue using Finta as we continue to raise new capital in our future rounds.”
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