Arbor, an AI research platform focused on enterprise operations, has raised $6.3 million in combined seed and pre-seed funding as it looks to scale product development and expand its team in New York. The seed round was led by 645 Ventures, with participation from Next Play Ventures, Chaac Ventures, Comma Capital, and notable angel investors, and was followed by a previously unannounced pre-seed round.
The company is positioning itself as a faster, more scalable alternative to traditional surveys and consultant-led research, aiming to capture insights from frontline employees and customers who often see operational issues firsthand but rarely have their feedback reach decision-makers. Arbor says its platform uses AI-powered interviews to quickly convert large volumes of offline conversations into executive-ready insights, enabling enterprises to identify patterns and bottlenecks without the time and cost of manual interview programs.
Arbor was founded by Veronica Ma and Kelly Zhou, who first met while investing together at Insight Partners, and they later brought on Ashish Dsa as CTO and co-founder. The company says its founding team has 0-to-1 startup experience and backgrounds spanning Meta and academic institutions, including Harvard and Princeton.
Arbor is already working with operationally complex enterprises, including transportation provider First Student and food manufacturer Lyons Magnus. The company says early customers are seeing participation rates of 85-90% while using the platform to surface operational constraints that translate into seven-figure cost savings.
Arbor’s pitch centers on replacing slow, labor-intensive qualitative research processes with an automated workflow that can run thousands of conversations in parallel and surface themes in near-real-time, scaling from dozens of interviews to thousands.
The new funding will be used to grow Arbor’s engineering, product, and go-to-market teams and to accelerate product development as the company expands into additional industries and use cases. Arbor is headquartered in New York and says it serves enterprises across manufacturing, logistics, retail, and other sectors where frontline and customer conversations are a critical but underutilized source of operational intelligence.
KEY QUOTES
“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.”
Veronica Ma, Co-founder and Chief Executive Officer, Arbor
“The opportunity to transform how enterprises capture qualitative, conversational insights is massive. The Arbor team is uniquely positioned to unlock it, bringing the perfect blend of AI expertise and deep understanding of enterprise operations. They’ve already earned the trust of some of the world’s largest, most operationally complex companies. We’re excited to partner with them as they scale.”
Nnamdi Okike, Co-founder and Managing Partner, 645 Ventures
