The Founders Arena, born from a partnership between the City of Arlington, Arlington Economic Development Corporation and First Rate, Inc., is an innovative WealthTech Accelerator designed to meet the needs of startup tech entrepreneurs. 

The 10-week intensive gives participants access to networking, funding, training and mentorship. Participating startups have created innovative products that banks and wealth management companies across the world can use to better serve their clients. The Founders Arena, headquartered at the new First Rate, Inc. campus in North Arlington, aims to foster innovation and entrepreneurship while actively engaging the local community through workshops, seminars, hackathons and networking events. 

The inaugural WealthTech Combine took place on Oct. 10-11, 2023. Members of the first Founders Arena cohort spent two days networking with industry experts, honing their business pitches and attending sessions on topics from artificial intelligence to the current state of wealth management and everything in-between. Learn more about each member of the inaugural cohort through the Arlington Economic Development Corporation’s “Founders Arena Spotlight” series.  

Name of Founder and Company
Rohit Agarwal, Co-Founder & Co-CEO of Sora Finance
San Francisco, California 

What makes your product unique? 
Most Americans have some degree of debt, whether it’s home, auto credit card, student or personal. The thing we’re trying to solve is that they’re often paying more interest than they should be because they didn’t get the best deal available to them when they took out a loan, or they don’t refinance or consolidate when it makes sense to. We’ve built a software that is constantly monitoring opportunities to save and guarantee the best rate when you’re taking out any type of loan. Financial advisors can use our software to support their clients on the liability side – we want them to see there’s a lot of opportunity to manage their clients’ debt in addition to their assets. 

What encouraged you to apply to the Accelerator?
The true overarching reason is we thought it would help our business. Help us gain awareness of what we’re doing to our target market of wealth managers, financial advisors, people in the wealth technology world. The second tangible thing is introductions to these companies. 

What’s the best part about the program so far? 
The best part has been meeting people around the Founders Area, who are incredibly nice and welcoming folks, as well as the people and companies in the cohort. All of us are at similar stages in our company, so problem-solving and discussing what we’re all seeing in the market. It definitely has a cohort feel and we’re all trying to help each other. 

How has working with the Founders Arena helped you achieve your goals?
Tactically, the main thing is helping us grow and enterprise customers. Through Founders Arena’s access, the people they bring to the table will get us in the door to larger scale wealth management firms or banks, which would be hard for us to do on our own. That will feed our ability to grow significantly as a company and raise more capital.

What’s next?
Our main goal is getting as many wealth managers and advisors on this software as possible. The main way we’re going to accelerate that is to raise more capital, build out our team. That will drive our ability to get more customers and improve our product.