Our investment in Arengu: sign-up forms and flows made simple

At K Fund, we’re often asked how long it takes us to decide whether we’d like to invest in a company or not. We get it, it’s important for founders to know how long they’re going to have to be involved in the fundraising process and to manage expectations. While it varies, we believe we can be quite agile and come to a conclusion in a matter of 6 to 8 weeks. For more details, take a look at this post that my colleague Iñaki published a few months ago.

However, I have to admit that it feels great when the opposite happens. When you meet a team at a certain point, you like them, you follow their developments for more than six months and then, when it feels like the right time for both parties, you end up making the investment and backing them for the long term.

That’s exactly what happened with Arengu, the newest member of our K Fund family.

The first conversation that I had with Jacobo, Sergio and Pablo took place in May 2018 (they were still called Rocketforms then) and it wasn’t until a year later that we started talking more seriously about what has ended up becoming their second funding round.

In that time, we got to see first-hand how they worked, their speed of development, how their thinking about the (huge) market they’re tackling evolved and, in the end, what they thought the best approach to get there was.

This period was also quite insightful for us to understand how we could help them achieve the objectives they have. We made a bunch of intros with a bunch of people that we believed could aid the company, even before the investment decision was made, and we became (and feel) like one more member of the great team they’ve put together.

Forms are just the tip of the iceberg

Forms are everywhere. If you think about it, every day you submit a ton of forms and most of the time you won’t notice it. Not just the typical contact forms that allow you to request additional information from a specific company, but also sign-up and login forms.

Some of those forms are pretty basic, but other types or forms can be quite complex and can help companies validate and identify users, set up recurring payments quick and easily, verify users with SMS and email verification systems, automatically submit user information to other products and services that the company uses, set up passwordless forms and many other use cases.

That’s in essence what Arengu provides: a simple and easy way to create sign-up forms and flows, connect them to your API or data sources and, in the end, to start acquiring new (and the right) users for your business.

This allows developers to free up time and resources to focus on other core areas of their businesses, and it also allows marketing teams to start collecting users -instead of leads- without the need of bothering internal technical teams and/or having coding skills. A win-win scenario.

Because, as Paul Graham recently tweeted, signing up for products and services online is still a crappy experience in a lot of cases:

We’re super happy to back Arengu and join them in their adventure.

Before saying goodbye, I’d like to add three more things:

1. Arengu is based in A Coruña. As a fellow Galician myself, I would be lying if I wouldn’t admit that it feels quite special to back a local startup. Especially one that sells to global clients from day one.
2. I would like to thank Rubén Ferreiro and Viko for sharing the investment opportunity with us, since Arengu is a company that was born within Viko and Elogia. I’d also like to thank Rafa Garrido and Lanai Partners for co-investing with us and, last but not least, Diego Mariño, because although he’s not an investor in the company, he’s helped us at K Fund and the company quite a bit in the past few months.
3. Last but not least, I’d like to thank not just Pablo, Sergio and Jacobo for allowing us to invest in the company, but also Andrea, Ana, Ivan and Martin for becoming the first employees of Arengu :)

A partires de aquí, con boa letra e sentidiño :)