This New Startup Wants to Help Founders Find Angel Investors

Johnson is a serial entrepreneur with two multi-million dollar exits for her businesses (No Subject) and Create & Cultivate, while Vuong, a digital product leader, helped scale the real estate company Open Listings to $4 billion in transactions. Their new business, Los-Angeles-based Cherub, is a new platform aimed at helping startups and angel investors connect.

Cherub, which officially launched on March 8, helps entrepreneurs get introduced to potential angel investors via a dating app-like interface and machine learning--"think Raya for deal flow," says Johnson. Its founders raised $1.1 million in--you guessed it--angel investments last year to bring the app into existence.

To get their app off the ground, Johnson and Vuong knew that they'd need enough capital not just to launch but also to fuel marketing and bring on their first hires. That meant they had to fundraise. "With the average fundraise taking 27 months and less than 2 percent of venture capital going to female and BIPOC founders, we knew fundraising wouldn't be an easy feat," Johnson says.

To make matters even more complex, the time they set out to fundraise proved to be a terrible day to pitch investors: Cherub started fundraising the same day that Silicon Valley Bank shut down in March 2023. That meant securing institutional capital was highly unlikely.

But first, they had to build a minimal viable product. The co-founders had initially intended to pitch their business pre-product, around the time of SVB's collapse, but once that institutional capital dried up and they realized they'd be better off finding angel investors, they bootstrapped to create the alpha version of their app. Once they did that and started targeting potential investors, they closed their $1.1 million raise in less than two months.

That approach enabled them to bring on strategic angel investors, including Blavity's Morgan DeBaun and Drybar's Alli Webb. "They bring passion for the product, deep strategic expertise across legal, operations, marketing, tech, and entrepreneurship, and networks of startup founders and other angel investors across the world," Johnson says.

Cherub's investors are a mix of seasoned and first-time angel investors, which Johnson says gives the company an advantage of better understanding its user base. "One of our larger goals is to grow the total addressable market of angel investing by having accredited investors write their first check--the feedback we received is many want to invest but just don't have access to good deal flow," she says. "By having a mix on our cap table, we are uniquely advantaged to get feedback and viewpoints of our target audience."

Less than two months old, Cherub already has a user base of 165 founders and 300 investors--and a waitlist of more than 3,500. "We have deliberately kept access to our beta launch small to ensure we're getting feedback and optimizing retention and engagement before opening it up to a broader audience," Johnson says."

The $1.1 million the company raised through angel investors will be used to further develop the platform, grow the team, and host in-person events for founders and funders across the U.S., in an effort to build community. The company currently has seven employees across product, brand and marketing, tech, design, and business develop

"With zero marketing spend to date we have secured thousands of founders and angels," Johnson says, adding that Cherub has already helped deploy more than $1 million to its founder users. "We are bullish that putting capital behind this already large organic growth will get us to profitability by next year."