Cashmere, an artificial intelligence-driven prospecting and lead-generation platform for financial advisors, has raised $3.6 million in seed funding.
The round was led by Canapi Ventures, with participation from Benchstrength, Plug and Play, The House Fund, Courtyard Ventures and several angel backers.
Canapi Ventures will act as board observers and will provide strategic guidance as Cashmere scales its operations, according to the announcement.
The company also announced the hiring of Sean Cheng, who has a PhD from Harvard in Applied Physics, as head of machine learning. Cheng joins co-founders Farbod Nowzad and Eshan Govil and a small team of engineers.
Nowzad previously founded social audio platform Pludo and held data science roles at several other startups, including Lime, prior to working on Cashmere, according to his LinkedIn profile. Govil is a former machine learning engineer from Goldman Sachs.
Cashmere shares some similarities with the prospecting and lead-generation technology platforms Finny and Aidentified. All three technologies tap into numerous repositories of publicly available data and apply algorithms to match advisor data from client advisory firms with potential leads and prospects.
As is the case with Finny, Cashmere can also create personalized outreach on behalf of advisors.
Cashmere has integrations with customer relationship management providers Salesforce, Redtail, Wealthbox, Hubspot and Microsoft 365, as well as several popular email and email management providers.
