Seed funding enables London tech start-up to scale its brand advocacy technology, helping more brands drive revenue through social commerce.      

London, 23 August 2022 – Duel, the UK’s leading Brand Advocacy platform used by companies including ASOS, Monica Vinader and Charlotte Tilbury, has secured a $3million Seed funding round led by SuperSeed.

Duel’s SaaS technology enables consumer brands to engage with and grow through their own communities of advocates, including existing customer ambassadors, 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. 

Paul Archer, co-Founder and CEO of Duel, explains: “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.”

The investment will enable Duel to continue its 13 percent 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.

Mads Jensen, Managing Partner at SuperSeed, comments: “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.”

*Data according to 2022 report by Accenture

– About Duel –

Duel is a Brand Advocacy SaaS platform that helps consumer retail brands grow through the advocacy of their passionate customers and fans.

The platform enables brands to coordinate, track and measure Advocates at scale, across multiple communities, including customer ambassadors, creators, influencers, athletes, and store employees, so they can:

– Acquire more customers through social commerce at a fraction of the cost of advertising

– Convert more customers by building trust through social proof (e.g. reviews and content)

– Retain more revenue by driving engagement, creating superfans and rewarding loyalty

By combining multiple advocacy tools into one platform, such as affiliate and referral tracking, engagement, incentive/reward distribution, as well as user-generated content brands can consolidate their vendor costs, measure the impact of advocacy and scale the number of advocates they work with from tens to many thousands.

Pulling on proven growth techniques from viral gaming and consumer psychology, the Duel technology was developed after consulting with hundreds of the world’s best brands to turn word-of-mouth marketing into a science and make growing a brand through advocacy as easy, predictable, and scalable as buying a Facebook ad.

The platform is used by brands such as ASOS, Unilever, Charlotte Tilbury, Rab, Monica Vinader, Mint Velvet, Beauty Pie, NEOM, Bleach London and Elemis.

Duel was featured in Gartner’s ‘Cool Vendor’ Retail Marketing category and is B Corp pending.

For more information, please visit: https://www.duel.tech/

About Superseed 

SuperSeed is a London-based venture capital firm built by founders, for founders. The firm provides both the capital and hands-on support to software start-ups, helping them accelerate from Seed to Series A. 

Founded in 2018 by Daniel Bowyer and Mads Jensen, SuperSeed has backed more than 16 high-growth B2B software companies to date. 

For more information, please visit https://www.superseed.com/