Arch, a software used by big banks, wealth management firms and single-family offices to manage their private investments, named Keith Soura its new chief technology officer this week and his primary goal is one that is proliferating in the industry: to use artificial intelligence to turn reams of information into insights for customers.
Soura joined the venture-backed company (Arch raised a $52 million Series B round of funding in September) last week after working at the mortgage fintech Better.com, where he led engineering. He also previously served as CTO of the proptech firm VERO.
The new executive is replacing Joel Stein, who co-founded Arch in 2018. Stein’s departure was amicable; he wanted to spend more time with his family, and he gave the company a full year to find a replacement, Arch co-founder and CEO Ryan Eisenman told Modus.
After an “exhaustive” search, the company hired Soura, someone still willing to code and be in the trenches, manage a growing team, and help Arch morph its platform, which digitizes investment documents and automates related tasks, into one that also delivers insights its customers can use to inform future investments. Put another way: They needed an experienced CTO who also knew a lot about AI.
Every software company with a data mountain is figuring out how to leverage it with AI, but the stakes are rising for venture- and private-equity-backed companies serving single-family offices. The SpaceX IPO and the anticipated initial public offerings of Anthropic and OpenAI are expected to spur a surge in new offices. That’s great for software and service providers because it’s easier to make a new office a customer than to convince an existing one to make changes. But the competition will be fierce—and the ultimate test of software companies' AI capabilities, since they will be courting offices of highly technical professionals.
Arch, like other companies, is highly aware of this and is preparing to try to capitalize on the business opportunity, Eisenman told Modus previously. The startup supports $460 billion in private assets for 575 institutional and private investors, including over 180 family offices, and has raised a total of $77.5 million of capital.
Soura’s first week at Arch coincided with a customer advisory board meeting, which he participated in.
“The overwhelming feelings that I got sitting in all the different sessions and meeting different amazing customers was essentially that the world is pivoting. People used to generate differentiation by the way that they accessed data or their knowledge with querying it or their ability to massage it or hire data scientists. And that barrier is very, very quickly going away. It's turning into a world where it's about how you ingest as much data as possible, then determine what is relevant, what is not, how it's classified, and how you're able to structure that data. That's what's going to give you the competitive edge in the future, especially when you're layering on these conversational tools or generative tools,” Soura said.
He added: Customers are "interested in pursuing this. They want to actually be able to have conversation with their own agents, Claude, or ChatGPT or whatever they're using, but they want a trusted data source and a trusted partner to provide that data to them. They all kind of know that just asking questions of unverified data is a very dangerous game.”
Soura also noted that different customers and users will want to access their Arch data differently. Some will want a polished dashboard, some an in-platform place to make AI queries, and others will want to use and develop their own tools. The cost of developing and offering those options to customers is much lower, so companies will do that, he said.
Before Soura’s arrival, Arch was already rolling out some AI features. When the SpaceX IPO was announced, it accelerated the development of a tool to help users better understand their exposure to the company. Importantly, Arch crunched the data and proactively sent alerts to customers. He expects Arch to push more alerts to customers who want them in the future.
The platform has also launched an agentic chat feature, which customer can use to quickly get briefs about their private investments. It’s also continuing to improve Arch Investment Research (AIR), a tool designed to help customers conduct due diligence by comparing terms, surfacing anomalies and tracking other factors.
Now, the AI baton is in Soura’s hand.
“We're just super excited to have Keith here,” Eisenman said. “As you can tell from his energy, his curiosity, his passion, I think he's really going to help accelerate Arch into our next phase of development.”
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