Cherub, an angel investing community inspired by dating apps, entices investors and founders to pair up

Jaclyn Johnson and Angeline Vuong were hiking and thinking about how difficult it is for people to get into angel investing when they realized they had stumbled upon a startup idea.

They are today co-founders of Cheruba marketplace that brings together angel investors and entrepreneurs.

Vuong spent nearly five years working on product and growth at Opendoor. Johnson founded Create and cultivatea self-proclaimed “media company for ambitious women” and had has experienced both sides of the investing world – as a founder and an investor. Before launching Create & Cultivate, Johnson sold his own startup (No topic) in 2016 and has invested in numerous companies, including luggage company Away.

Johnson compares Los Angeles-based Cherub to Raya, a membership-based online community for datingas it matches founders and angel investors based on their preferences.

“You can access this platform as an entrepreneur and you can access it as an angel investor and have access to both people and express your interest based on tags,” she said in an interview with TechCrunch . “So for example, if I go on the app and I’m interested in women-owned businesses in the CPG industry that are doing their Series A or something specific, I’ll get a shallow deal flow that matches the best to what I am. looking for.”

With Cherub, investors and entrepreneurs can see who is interested in them downstream. If they’re interested too, they can mark it as such and it’s a match. Conversely, if an investor approaches a founder but the founder does not view them as a potential candidate, they may reject the invitation to connect. Or if an entrepreneur’s minimum investment is $25,000 but an angel investor only invests $10,000 per deal, they may see that and not reach out to connect.

“We kind of use the mechanics of dating apps,” Johnson said. “So we jokingly call it the Raya for transaction flow.”

Membership based

To test Cherub’s concept, Johnson and Voung launched a weekly newsletter last year that got 1,500 signups in three weeks through word of mouth alone.

Encouraged, the two created an alpha product last summer that featured about 40 companies and gave investors a way to request a pitch. All 40 received requests for views of the bridge, Johnson said. Half of those views resulted in an introduction, she said, in which investors expressed interest in being introduced by the founder. Twenty percent of these IPOs ended up being funded in less than three months, collectively raising $1.1 million in capital.

Of those deals, 40% were new angel investors, meaning they were accredited investors who had never written a check before.

Cherub is currently off to a slow start, with 100 startups on the platform generating $50,000 in revenue. They plan to increase that to 500 and have a waiting list of 1,500 startups, Johnson said.

Cherub is free for investors and charges startups through a membership model. A $480/year subscription allows founders to list their companies in the directory and includes analytics such as how many people viewed their presentation. Cherub Select membership costs $950 a year and involves a more in-depth process to show the company more actively to investors, Johnson said.

Johnson said Cherub also helps founders find incubators and accelerators and has partnerships with the associated incubators of companies such as Andreessen Horowitz, Dream Ventures and New York Fashion Tech Lab.

Investors also have access to data such as “updates on how a company is performing, whether or not it’s raising and how much,” Johnson said.

Of course, Cherub is not the only platform combining angel investors and entrepreneurs. AngelList is the largest and best known. Israeli crowdsourcing company OurCrowd is also huge, and there are also those offered by venture capital firms, like Hustle Squad. Angel Squad for qualified investors, or others like The Jason Calacanis Union.

But Cherub is different in many ways, Johnson says. On the one hand, it is features startups with a focus on consumer packaged goods (CPG) companies. But it also includes AI companies, hospitality projects and applications, among others.

AngelList is more of a B2B platform, is very focused on the technology industry and is best suited to those who already have knowledge or experience in investing in startups and can afford to invest quite large sums , according to Johnson.

Then there’s the crowdsourced Wefunder or Republic, which will allow investors to invest small amounts, sometimes as little as $100, which Johnson describes as “the boost of angel investing.”

Cherub sits in the middle, she said. For example, like traditional venture capital firms, the company hosts “founder-backer mixers.” Last year, for example, Cherub partnered with Sophia Amoruso’s Trust Fund to host a cocktail party where “everything onsite was investable,” such as the drinks served and a pop-up shop where guests could “buy anything”. products they want to test.

“From this event alone, over $400,000 in transactions were generated,” Johnson said.

Angel investor Allen Orr told TechCrunch that he has used other platforms such as AngelList in the past.

“However, I felt it wasn’t a very personal experience and felt too transactional,” he told TechCrunch via email. “What appealed to me about Cherub was the idea of ​​a tailored and social investment approach,” he said, adding “I also liked the fact that there are opportunities not only to invest, but also to advise brands.

Maggie Rose Macar, founder and CEO of mental health support app Zant, said an investor wrote her company a $25,000 check after it was featured in an early release from Cherub’s newsletters and after meeting the investor in person at one of Cherub’s events. .

“I think Cherub does a great job attracting active investors with founders who are looking,” she told TechCrunch.

Cherub raised $1.25 million itself, naturally from angel investors including Alli Webb of Drybar and Morgan DeBaun of Blavity, among others.