Why we’re building Arcvest
Lewis and I didn’t start Arcvest because we wanted to build a crypto company. We started it because we kept watching people lose money they had already earned.
Lewis was watching freelancers and remote workers get paid in dollars and lose 5% to 8% of every payment to wire fees, PayPal charges, and currency conversion costs before the money even landed in their accounts. Real work. Real income. Eroded before they ever touched it.
I was watching the same thing happen on the other side of remittances. Migrants in the US and Europe send money home to family — $200, $500, $1,000 at a time and lose $20 to $50 every single time to Western Union, MoneyGram, and Remitly.
Crypto promised to fix this. Stablecoins especially. But the experience was broken in a different way — seed phrases, gas fees, confusing wallets, no customer support, and no recovery if you made a mistake. The people who needed stablecoins most were the ones least equipped to navigate raw crypto infrastructure.
So we decided to build the bridge.
Arcvest is an AI-powered crypto bank for global citizens. You can save in USDC and earn 6% APY — ten times what any traditional bank offers. You can trade crypto with zero KYC through our built-in DEX. You can send money anywhere in the world instantly, for free. And Arc Intelligence, our AI agent, automates all of it — recurring payments, portfolio rebalancing, price-triggered swaps — so you set it once and move on with your life.
We’re not building for crypto natives. We’re building for the 2 billion people that traditional finance has decided aren’t worth serving.
The raise
We went into fundraising with six weeks of beta data; 250 users, $80,000 in deposits, 78% thirty-day retention. The product was working. But we had zero investor network. No warm introductions. No Stanford alumni dinners. Just a product, traction, and a story we hadn’t yet learned to tell properly.
We tried cold outreach for six weeks. Over 150 emails. Three responses. All passed.
The breakthrough came when we rethought our approach entirely. We started working with Swyft Fundr — a platform that gives early-stage founders access to a pool of pre-committed capital from investors who are actively looking to deploy. What made the difference wasn’t just the introductions. It was the strategic work that came before them: repositioning our narrative, rebuilding our deck around the financial inclusion angle, and making sure every investor we met was already primed to understand what we were doing.
The result was 18 targeted introductions. Fourteen meetings. Two term sheets in the same week. A closed round in 41 days — at $3.8M, above our original $3M target.
What comes next
This capital gives us the runway to execute on what we’ve been building toward.
We’re hiring across engineering — backend, frontend, smart contracts, and AI. We’re launching our mobile apps on iOS and Android. We’re getting our Money Transmitter Licenses in key markets. And we’re scaling from 250 users to 10,000, starting with the freelancer and remittance communities across Latin America, Nigeria, the Philippines, and India where the need is most acute.
The version of Arcvest that exists today is already solving a real problem for real people. The version we’re building next will solve it at a scale that actually changes things.
If you’re a developer, designer, or operator who wants to work on something that reaches people traditional finance has given up on — we’re hiring.
If you’re a freelancer, remote worker, or anyone sending money across borders — we’re ready for you.
And if you’re a founder trying to raise your first institutional round without a network — Swyft Fundr is where we’d start.
— Andre Smith, COO & Co-Founder, Arcvest
