The bottleneck was never the model. It was permission.
Arcade raised $60M so AI agents can prove who did what. Your raise has the same missing record, and a spreadsheet fixes it.
On 15 June 2026, Arcade announced a $60 million Series A. SYN Ventures led it. Morgan Stanley and Wipro came in as strategic investors.
The company does not build a smarter agent. It builds the layer that lets an agent take an action on your behalf, and proves afterwards which agent did it.
That is the whole product. Permission and receipts.
Read what the money is actually buying
Enterprises did not fund a better brain. They funded an audit trail.
The reason is boring and correct. An agent that can only read is a demo. An agent that sends the email, moves the record and updates the invoice is a liability. It stops being one when somebody can reconstruct what it did.
So the value moved to the layer nobody demos. Who authorised this. What did it touch. Can we prove it later.
I spent months on exactly this problem inside our own CRM. Not the model. The plumbing underneath it.
Every raise loses its own record
Here is where it lands for a founder.
You will have somewhere between 60 and 200 investor conversations in a raise. Emails, intros, calls, a forwarded deck, a promise to circle back in Q4.
Ask most founders in month four who said what in month one. They cannot tell you. It lives in three inboxes, a WhatsApp thread and someone’s memory.
That is not an organisation problem. It is the same missing layer Arcade just raised $60 million to sell.
What goes missing
- Who introduced them The path matters more than the name. You will want it again for the next round.
- What you promised A metric you said you would send. Four weeks later nobody remembers, including you.
- Why they passed Stage, cheque size, portfolio conflict, or the real reason they did not put in writing.
- When to come back Half of all passes are timing. A pass with no re-contact date is a wasted conversation.
Build the receipts layer, not the CRM
You do not need software for this. You need one sheet and the discipline to write to it the same day.
Ten columns. That is the whole system.
The sheet
Ten columns that survive a six-month raise
-
Step 01
Who and how
Firm, partner, intro path, date of first contact. The intro path is the column people skip and regret.
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Step 02
State and reason
Stage in your pipeline, plus the stated reason for the last move. Their words, not your summary.
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Step 03
Owed and due
What you owe them, and the date. This column is the one that actually closes rounds.
The prompt that keeps it honest
The sheet decays because writing it up is tedious. This is the part I automate.
After every call, paste your raw notes into this. It returns one clean row.
You are turning a messy call note into one row of a fundraising tracker.
Here is my raw note from the call:
[PASTE UNEDITED NOTES]
Return exactly these fields, one per line. If something was not said,
write UNKNOWN. Never guess.
FIRM:
PARTNER:
DATE:
STAGE_AFTER_CALL: (one of: first contact, partner meeting, diligence,
IC, pass, committed)
THEIR_STATED_REASON: (quote or close paraphrase of why we are at that
stage, in their words)
WHAT_I_OWE_THEM: (the specific artefact, not "follow up")
DUE_BY: (a date, or UNKNOWN)
OBJECTION_RAISED: (one sentence, or NONE)
RE_CONTACT_DATE: (if they passed on timing, when they said to return)
CONFIDENCE: (high if they gave a clear next step, low if they were vague)
Then, separately, write one line: the single thing in this note that
contradicts what I have told other investors. If nothing does, write NONE.That last instruction earns its place. Over a long raise the story drifts. You start quoting a slightly different growth number, or you soften a churn figure once and then keep the softer version.
The model catches it because it has no ego in the answer.
What this is really for
Ninety percent of the value shows up at the end, not during.
When you go out for the next round, that sheet is the difference between starting cold and starting warm. Forty names you have already met. A reason each one said no. A date they told you to come back.
Arcade sells that to enterprises as an authorisation layer. For a founder it is ten columns and a habit.
The prompt above and the sheet template are on the resources page. Free, no email required.