How Steno used Metal to build Calendar Density for a Seed Round
$250K
Total raised
Steno AI builds AI agents for specialized customer acquisition and conversion workflows. Arman Assadi, Founder and CEO, came to Metal while raising the company’s Seed round in a category where both the competitive landscape and investor attention were moving quickly.
Problem Statement
Arman already had the network. Through founder communities, previous investors, and Techstars, he had access to thousands of people who could potentially help with the raise. The bottleneck was turning that network into 15+ qualified investor meetings every week.
Knowing hundreds of founders was not the same as knowing who could credibly introduce him to each target investor. Manually reconstructing those relationships through LinkedIn was slow, cumbersome and ineffective. As with any sales-focused process, Arman knew that speed mattered.
Introducing Relationship Intelligence
Metal’s proprietary Relationship Intelligence turned Arman’s existing network into a structured, actionable graph. By integrating Gmail and LinkedIn, Arman could distinguish his strongest relationships from the broader network and immediately understand which people were actually positioned to help.
Metal’s rich data on people, investors, and their underlying relationships then surfaced direct and multi-hop pathways into Arman’s target investors, including founders who had previously raised from them and investors who had co-invested alongside them.
Instead of researching one investor and one connection at a time, Arman could systematically identify the strongest path into every investor in his pipeline and run multiple warm-intro threads in parallel. His network stopped being a collection of contacts and became a repeatable engine for calendar density.
Outcome
With Metal turning investor introductions into a systematic and repeatable workflow, Arman was able to sustain 15+ qualified investor calls per week while shifting time away from manual LinkedIn research and toward actually securing introductions.
That momentum helped Steno AI move through its Seed process at speed, ultimately closing $3m+ within 90 days.
"At the seed stage, building calendar density is a critical requirement to close the round quickly and seamlessly. We used Metal for the relationship intelligence, enabling us to organize our network and identify who within our network was best positioned to introduce us with specific investors."
— Arman Assadi
Founder & CEO, Steno AI
