Arcane, described as an AI co-pilot for modern marketers, has raised a £4 million seed round led by Accel.
The platform is currently in closed beta but is onboarding waitlist sign-ups in the lead up to an open beta launch.
Arcane says that digital marketing teams work across disparate tech stacks – the average enterprise uses 91 marketing tools – to deal with large amounts of data across different channels simultaneously. A modern social media marketer, for example, will use separate tools for scheduling blog posts, running analytics and conducting competitor research.
The startup has created a knowledge base for marketers that combines everything they need – data, metrics, assets, targeting parameters – in one platform. It was founded in late 2021 by CEO Ben Hacking (ex-Deliveroo, ex-WeWork) and CTO Jeremy Frenay (ex-Babylon).
Arcane integrates with content, organic, paid, social and email marketing channels. Its AI co-pilot then supports marketers in the background by automating the most mundane tasks, assessing and reporting back in real-time on their campaigns, and recommending next steps, acting as the ‘digital brain’ for their marketing activity.
The round saw participation from Cocoa, Firstminute Capital, Kima Ventures and Seedcamp. Angel investors including Meta’s VP Product for generative AI Connor Hayes, Monzo founder Tom Blomfield, Supercell CEO Ilkka Paananen and WeWork President Anthony Yazbeck also participated in the round.
The funding includes a previously unannounced $1m pre-seed round, and will be used to expand Arcane’s engineering and data teams, and further develop the platform’s AI functionalities ahead of its open beta later this year.
“The vast majority of marketers’ time is spent on work other than copy generation, so we see significant potential in augmenting and automating these tasks,” said Hacking. “To do this, we’ve combined the latest AI technologies – retrieval augmented generation, autonomous agents and multi-modal models – to chain together workflows that capture more of marketers’ repetitive activities, giving them time back to focus on higher impact tasks.
“We’re excited to continue on this mission with this new investment round and having the Accel team join us on this journey.”
Sonali De Rycker, partner at Accel, said: “Digital marketing has evolved into a multi-hundred billion dollar industry, yet there remains a sizable opportunity for a platform like Arcane.
“Having experienced first hand the frustrations of actioning repetitive, time-consuming day-to-day tasks, Ben and Jeremy are ideally positioned to build a platform that will transform the modern marketing workflow.
“We’ve been incredibly impressed by the cutting-edge AI automations built into Arcane, and believe that the platform has the potential to radically change how marketers operate everywhere.”