How a Creator Economy Founder Used Metal to Raise Seed
$13M+
Total raised
Hummingbirds is building the infrastructure for hyperlocal creators, helping creators discover relevant campaigns while enabling brands to reach local audiences through trusted local voices. Charise Flynn, Founder and CEO, came to Metal while raising the company’s Seed round.
Problem Statement
Charise wasn’t struggling to get investor meetings. Hummingbirds’ positioning in a fast-growing creator economy was generating interest — but interest did not always translate into investors with qualifies interest, or conversations that moved the round forward.
For Charise, one challenge was walking into every meeting not knowing how that specific investor had actually done prior investments particularly at the Seed stage.
Introducing Meeting Intelligence
Metal’s proprietary Meeting Intelligence, powered by its Investor Memory Layer, gives founders a much deeper read on every investor conversation — before it happens, while preparing for it, and after it ends.
Rather than treating each meeting as a standalone call, Metal combines the investor’s historical behavior, deal patterns, thesis alignment, and prior meeting context to provide insights tailored to the founder’s context. Ultimately, this helped Charise understand what was likely to matter to that investor, where conviction may exist, and where friction could emerge. Charise was also able to pressure-test her pitch through AI mock conversations before stepping into the real meeting.
Post-call, Metal analyzed the conversation against that same body of investor intelligence — surfacing what resonated, what may signal hesitation or intent, and how she may want to adapt going into the next interaction.
The result was a compounding intelligence loop, where every meeting made the next one sharper and increased the founder’s ability to turn initial interest into real momentum.
Outcome
Metal helped Charise turn relevant investor discovery and warm network access into meetings; while Meeting Intelligence helped convert that meeting momentum into more consequential second and third conversations, and ultimately term sheets for a $9m Seed financing.
"Prior to investor meetings, we use Metal to look up investors and understand their prior investing patterns. This allows us to fully understand a given investor's focus prior to the call, enabling us to build the conversation in the right direction."
— Charise Flynn
Founder/CEO, Hummingbirds
