Many employees in large organisations know what works and what doesn’t, but their insights often don’t reach leaders. Traditional surveys and consulting are expensive, slow, and often produce outdated reports by the time decisions are made.
Arbor solves this problem by using AI interviews to capture real-world signals from people closest to the work across frontline operational and revenue teams in retail, hospitality, manufacturing, and field-based environments. The platform turns these conversations into organised insights, helping leaders spot patterns and areas for improvement in hours instead of months.
Today, Arbor has raised $6.3 million in seed funding. 645 Ventures led the round, with Next Play Ventures (founded by LinkedIn Executive Chairman Jeff Weiner), Chaac Ventures, Comma Capital, and several angel investors also participating.
This funding comes after an earlier pre-seed round and will help Arbor grow its team and speed up product development to meet rising demand from businesses.
Becoming the main source of operational intelligence for businesses
Co-founders Veronica Ma and Kelly Zhou, who first met investing together at Insight Partners, brought on CTO and co-founder Ashish Dsa. The founding team brings deep 0-to-1 experience across multiple startups and backgrounds from Meta, Harvard, and Princeton.
“There’s a crisis of wasted knowledge happening right now in every warehouse, every store, every manufacturing floor. The people doing the work and the customers visiting the site know what’s broken. Companies are leaving millions on the table by not listening. Our mission is to unlock ground truth, and this funding lets us do it at the scale these industries deserve,” said Veronica Ma, CEO and Co-Founder of Arbor.
The platform uses AI to analyse large volumes of unstructured conversations and surface patterns, themes, and metrics leaders can act on in real time. Instead of using forms or spreadsheets, Arbor analyses real conversations to immediately highlight key themes and metrics.
Veronica and Kelly elaborate, “Arbor enables organisations to run ongoing, high-quality conversations across revenue and operational workflows, synthesise insights across hundreds or thousands of conversations, and translate qualitative signals into structured outputs that leaders can act on.”
Arbor stands out because it gets high participation rates (over 85%), runs automated interviews at scale, and gives leaders real-time visibility through interactive dashboards. The platform has shown clear returns by helping companies cut costs and improve processes.
Veronica and Kelly add, “Our platform is model-agnostic by design—we work across the frontier of AI, leveraging the latest from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and others to match the right capability to each task. The result: strategic clarity that rivals top-tier consulting, at a speed, scale, and cost structure that wasn’t previously possible.”
Companies like First Student and Lyons Magnus use Arbor to help their teams and work more efficiently. Early customers have seen participation rates of 85 to 90 per cent and identified bottlenecks that have saved millions of dollars.
Platforms like Qualtrics and Medallia offer structured survey tools, but Arbor’s approach focuses on open-ended conversations. “Arbor replaces fragmented, expensive, and slow approaches with a single system for understanding what actually drives revenue and operational outcomes,” note Veronica and Kelly.
What’s next?
With this new funding, Arbor plans to grow its engineering, product, and sales teams and expand into manufacturing, logistics, and retail. The company will also keep building advanced analytics and improve how its platform connects with other business systems so insights can be used right away.
Veronica and Kelly conclude, “Our long-term goal is to make human insight as operationally essential as financial reporting.”
