Brand advocacy platform Duel has secured £2.5m in a seed funding round led by SuperSeed.
Duel’s platform is used by companies including ASOS, Dove and Charlotte Tilbury and enables consumer brands to engage with and grow through their own communities of advocates, customers, socially active followers and industry professionals.
The platform helps brands to engage with and incentivise these individuals to advocate on their behalf, helping businesses acquire customers more cost effectively than traditional digital advertising allows.
The investment will enable Duel to continue its 13 per cent monthly growth rate in 2022 and better serve its expanding global client base. In addition, it will help the business attract and develop more talent to support the company’s ambitious plans this year.
Paul Archer, co-founder and CEO of Duel, said: “We’re in the depths of a people-powered revolution when it comes to growing consumer brands, as now content created by real people influences so many of our purchase decisions, not ads generated by businesses.
“If brands want to capitalise on the fact that commerce is rapidly moving to social, they need to tap into their own communities of people, identifying their most social, influential, and highly passionate brand fans, and then grow through them.
“The biggest problem larger brands face in unlocking the potential of this opportunity is managing the scale required to build and nurture relationships with all their advocates. We created Duel to do just that.
“This investment will be instrumental in helping us work with more global brands looking to grow revenue through social platforms without having to pump huge sums of money into advertising.”
Mads Jensen, managing partner at SuperSeed, said: “For too long, consumer brands have been forced to rely on expensive ads to drive revenue. Duel’s technology is a game changer, as it helps brands reduce their reliance on ineffective advertising strategies and instead use their own communities to grow.
“Thanks to Duel, consumer brands can track, measure and coordinate thousands of their own advocates at scale, massively accelerating social commerce, a market opportunity set to be worth $1.2 trillion by 2025.*
“We believe this company has the potential to become one of the most important SaaS companies to emerge from the UK in years. Watch this space.”