Case study · Arch Capital
How Raises.com Took Arch Capital From Deal-by-Deal Syndication to a $100M Fund Platform
What we did, in the client’s own words, and the mechanism behind each result
Abdiel Louis came to Raises.com with a record most sponsors would envy and a ceiling he could not clear on his own. Seven syndicated deals, three exits, every one of them beating its projection. And still, every new transaction started the capital clock from zero. This document sets out exactly what we did for Arch Capital, in the order we did it, with the client’s own account of what each intervention replaced. Eighteen months later the firm runs two funds: a $100 million Reg D vehicle and a Regulation A+ impact fund that drew equal investor interest at its first outing. Every quotation is from a recorded interview with Mr. Louis.
The full recorded interview with Abdiel Louis, founder of Arch Capital. Every quotation below is taken from it.
1. What he arrived with, and what was actually blocking him
The presenting problem was not performance, deal flow, or investor confidence. Arch Capital had all three.
- Seven syndicated deals, three as lead partner, four on both the GP and LP side.
- Three exits, all of them ahead of plan. Returns were projected conservatively at 16% to 18%. All three exited between 19% and 21.2% IRR.
- Repeat investors. In his words, “our investors are very pleased and they like to come back and invest with us.”
We want to be precise about attribution, because a case study that overclaims is worthless to the reader deciding whether to trust us. Those returns are his, earned before our engagement. What he could not do alone was convert that record into a platform. The constraint was structural:
“As we do more syndication, it’s always coming down to equity and capital. Every deal that we do, we need to raise equity and take those down with my partners.”
A syndicator with a 21% exit is still, on the morning after that exit, a sponsor with no committed capital and a blank pipeline. The question he brought us, about eighteen months to two years before this interview, was his own: “how do we create a fund, and then be able to leverage the fund to diversify our portfolio, but also to provide better ROI on equity and better terms for our investors?”
That is the problem we were hired to solve. Not returns. The machinery that turns a proven operator into a fund manager.
2. What we did, intervention by intervention
Four things. Each one replaced a specific bottleneck, and he describes each in his own terms below.
2.1 We underwrote his live deals on demand, including at the last minute
Arch Capital did not need us to teach them underwriting. They needed a second institutional opinion fast enough to act on, which is the thing a growing sponsor cannot buy and cannot staff.
“If we need advice, we can reach out to you or to your team. On several instances we’ve had your team underwrite some of our deals, which is very unique, and have great feedback on a project we’re working on last minute.”
What this replaced: an internal investment committee the firm was too small to carry, and the delay of commissioning outside analysis per deal. The mechanism: our desk functions as an external IC on request, so a go or no-go decision lands inside the window a live deal allows. Note his phrase “last minute”. The value was not the analysis in the abstract, it was the analysis arriving before the decision had to be made.
2.2 We introduced him to decision-makers, not to contacts
This is where most capital-introduction services quietly fail, and he draws the distinction himself without being prompted:
“We’ve been able to connect with many mastermind members and have several warm introductions. And when we say warm introductions, these are direct decision makers who can actually tell us, yes we can help, no we cannot help, but we can provide a referral.”
The test he applies: an introduction that cannot produce a decision is not an introduction. A name that has to escalate internally, or a gatekeeper who will “take it to the team”, costs a sponsor weeks and returns nothing. Every route we opened terminated in someone who could answer.
And the second-order result, which we did not design and he volunteered: even the declines were productive. The referrals that came back from people who said no carried structural ideas:
“Those referrals actually had given us even greater ideas, and also provide other structures and a way of being more creative in our raise for our funds that we did not think about prior.”
Read that closely. A sophisticated sponsor with seven deals behind him is saying our network changed how he structured his own funds, not merely who he could call. That is the compounding return on being in the room with people who allocate for a living.
2.3 We put his plan in the hot seat, on a fixed cadence
Twice-weekly calls, Monday and Wednesday. He describes the format and, more usefully, why it works:
“My favourite is participation in those weekly calls or bi-weekly calls, Monday and Wednesday. It’s almost like the hot seat. So you provide your plan and you get grilled live, but everybody gets to see it, and then see areas that you can improve, but also understand the other side of the conversation that should happen, that the partners in your organisation, the partners on your team, should be asking.”
What this replaced: the blind spot every founding team develops about its own deal. The mechanism: adversarial review in public, on a schedule, so weaknesses surface in a room that costs nothing instead of in front of an allocator. The line worth dwelling on is the last one. The value was not only the critique of his plan; it was learning which questions his own partners should have been asking him. We did not just pressure-test a deal. We upgraded the firm’s internal standard for interrogating its own work.
2.4 We gave him a structured entry, then a shortcut past it
He is clear that the platform is sequenced rather than a library you are left to wander:
“When you join, there are steps you follow. Get the basics: what the documents are, who to reach out to if you have certain types of questions.”
Once through that, the model changes from documents to people, and this is where he says the real time saving sits. Where one member is strong in debt instruments and another in equity, mezzanine or the legal structure, the introduction replaces the research:
“You reach out and you get quickly introduced to someone, versus trying to figure it out yourself and spending days in agony. I think one phone call, one email, you’ll get an answer.”
Days of agony, against one phone call. For a sponsor whose constraint is time rather than intelligence, that ratio is the entire value proposition. He adds the framing himself: “time is very fleeting, but also time is essential.”
He also names the back-end tooling in passing, “leveraging the back-end solution you guys have as well, to pull a new investor profile”, and the one-on-one conversations outside the scheduled calls, which he calls the shortcut.
3. His verdict on the relationship
“For my co-founder, my partner here at Arch Capital, and myself, Raises.com has become invaluable to what we’re doing [...] Raises.com is truly a strategic partner, and we’re trying to take advantage of that every time we have a need, or when we need to discuss different ways of structuring deals and raising capital.”
The operative words are “strategic partner” and “every time we have a need”. This is not a course he completed. It is a standing capability the firm now routes decisions through.
4. What got built: two vehicles, deliberately different
The output of the engagement is a two-fund platform, and the pairing is intentional. The exemption determines who may invest, and that single decision drives the capital base, the yield and the pace of the raise.
Vehicle 1: High Income Growth Fund
- Regulation D, $100 million target, 18% target yield.
- Commercial mixed-use and multifamily real estate.
- Strategy: high growth plus tax-advantaged growth, deployed alongside experienced sponsors the principals have invested with for six to ten years.
- Position: an equity stake and a GP or co-investment position, with Arch Capital sitting on the management team rather than allocating passively.
Vehicle 2: the Impact Fund
- Regulation A+, 10% target yield, workforce housing, multifamily and single-family rental.
- Open to accredited and non-accredited investors, so retail can participate directly. He calls it “really like a mini IPO”, giving investors “a part of something bigger than themselves”.
- He is explicit that retail access costs nothing in performance: it offers “the same return, the same tax, even more tax advantage if you look at where we are investing”.
5. The thesis we helped him take to market
We include this because it demonstrates the calibre of what our desk was underwriting, and because it is the most instructive passage in the interview for any sponsor.
The Impact Fund is not a generic distress play. It rests on a distinction most underwriting misses:
- Physical occupancy is how full the building is. An asset can report 90% or 99%.
- Economic occupancy is how much is actually being collected, because a proportion of tenants cannot meet the obligation.
The gap between those two numbers is where post-COVID distress hides. A 99% physically occupied asset with materially lower economic occupancy has debt service under pressure while its marketing still reads healthy. His diagnosis of the cohort: smaller boutique operators “did not have enough reserve, or did not have any sensitivity analysis in the underwriting” for an event like COVID. From there the chain is mechanical. Loans fall into deficit, the bank calls them, and the operator becomes a forced seller.
Arch Capital’s response is what he calls a triple factor: acquire at a steep discount from a forced seller, inject capital and install new management to reposition, then exit at a higher equity multiple, targeting 2x and up.
6. Where the platform stood at interview
- High Income Growth Fund: 10% committed of the $100 million target, with one third of the raise targeted by Q1.
- Impact Fund soft-launched at a family office club event in Dallas, where the response reset expectations: “the interest we received was equally the same as the high income growth interest in that fund.”
- Public-sector engagement. Discussions with Dallas public officials toward a public-private partnership in which the fund supplies the equity.
- An asset-contribution model under which existing assets could be leased or transferred into the fund rather than every position being bought with fresh cash.
- His own forecast: the Reg A+ vehicle outpaces the larger, higher-yielding one, driven by specific MSAs and sub-markets.
Neither the public-private partnership nor the contribution model existed in the original design. Both emerged from putting the vehicle in front of the right room before it was finished, which is what the introductions were for.
7. What he tells other sponsors to do
Asked for advice, he refuses the idea of a single unlock: “it’s like learning to ride a bike. Because you buy the bike doesn’t mean that you know how to ride the bike the very first day.” What he offers instead is a sequence.
- Understand the sector before the raise. Learn what investors look for in your specific strategy, whether that is construction, mixed-use development, or acquiring multifamily for repositioning or light value-add.
- Learn the vocabulary precisely. Average return, preferred return, cumulative return. Terms you must be able to define, not approximate, because the LP conversation turns on them.
- Judge the people, then the model. “Often the numbers do not lie. But if the trust or the relationship between the general partners and the limited partners is not trusted [...] yes, you may be able to make money, but ultimately you would not have a great experience.” And the line that generalises furthest: “the business plan does not execute itself. It’s the people behind it.”
- Size the first deals to be noticed. “Start where you feel comfortable, but also I would say start big enough where institutional capital starts to notice you, because that’s very important.” Once those conversations begin you learn to “speak their language and understand their mandate”, and then the flow reverses: “you start getting calls, hey, do you have deals, can we work on these deals, let’s partner on either raising the debt or raising the equity, or maybe coming on board as an asset manager.” A deal too small to register never starts that loop, however well it performs.
- Partner where you lack experience rather than acquiring it on a live deal. “Where you lack experience, you’ll find someone who has the experience. Then just partner with them and take down deals.”
- Ask. “Be active. Ask questions. No question is stupid.”
8. What a sponsor in the same position should take from this
The honest summary of our contribution, stated as narrowly as the evidence allows:
- We did not create Arch Capital’s track record. Seven deals and three exits at 19% to 21.2% were his, before us.
- We removed the constraint that record could not remove on its own, the per-deal equity clock, by supplying the underwriting bandwidth, the decision-maker access and the adversarial review that turn a proven syndicator into a fund manager.
- The measurable difference: a firm that raised deal by deal now runs a $100 million Reg D fund and a Reg A+ vehicle that matched it for investor interest at first outing, with a public-private partnership forming around it.
If you are a sponsor with real returns and no committed capital, the gap between where you are and a fund platform is not talent and it is not track record. It is underwriting bandwidth, access to people who can say yes, and somebody willing to grill your plan before an allocator does. That is precisely what we supplied here.