Arrows, a startup that builds software to help software companies onboard customers, announced today that it had raised $2.75million from Google's Gradient Ventures. A host of angels joined the round, including Justyn Howard, CEO and founder of Sprout Social.According to Arrows CEO Daniel Zarick the company was bootstrapped up until this round. This allowed the startup to invite dozens of smaller investors, including 28 micro-checks. The funding event was rolled into one line-item through AngelList which allows smaller investments to be combined.Arrows sells software CEOs and head of customer success to ensure that new customers are up and running as soon as possible with digital products. Zarick says that customer success can accelerate adoption of a new product or service, which can help boost revenue from usage-based services. It is also well known that better onboarding can lead to greater adoption within customer organizations, potentially limiting churn.Arrows has been able to sell into fertile ground due to the size of the current software market. This is why Zarick and Benedict Fritz, his co-founder, decided to raise more capital and stop operating as a one-person business. Zarick said they were concerned about their company being suffocated without capital.Arrows were fortunate to have a single investor who was already paying attention to their work. Darian Shirazi from Gradient Ventures was the investor. He had reached out to Arrows several times before the startup even considered raising external funds. According to the Arrows CEO Shirazi, he had sent his portfolio companies to the startup as leads before he invested. Some of these companies have since become customers. Fritz and Zarick decided to venture capital.$2.75 Million round was raised by a SAFE at one cap without discount.Arrows launched its service initially in March. However, it is revising its pricing and closing its self-serve model.It is fascinating to hear the CEO of a seed stage startup talk about how he has transformed from a bootstrapped business model to one that has received venture funding. TechCrunch interviewed Zarick about how his job is changing as the company scales up to eight employees. The company plans to keep that human scale in place for a while.According to its CEO, Arrows can live with its current capital for two years without revenue growth. However, we would expect that once it has attracted seed capital other VCs may look to add to a trend weve seen many times in the recent weeks and months.In the next few months, the Arrows product will also be evolving. Although customer onboarding teams have been able to use spreadsheets and modern software, the startup still has a lot of work ahead, including integrations with other software. Let's see if we get back to Arrows. Anyone can bet that it will happen before the end the year.
