• Company has created the first knowledge base for marketers that combines everything they need – data, metrics, assets, targeting parameters – in one platform
• Arcane goes further than existing no-code approaches to workflow automation, providing the structure a non-technical marketer needs most

London, 14 December, 2023: Arcane, the AI co-pilot for modern marketers, today announces that it has raised a $5M seed round led by Accel, with 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.

Digital marketing has become critical for businesses, with global spending predicted to reach over $680bn in 2023. However, marketing teams today face multiple difficulties in their workflows. Most teams work across disparate tech stacks – the average enterprise uses 91 marketing tools – to deal with large amounts of data across different channels simultaneously. For instance, the modern social media marketer will use separate tools for scheduling blog posts, running analytics, and conducting competitor research. This means that marketers feel overburdened and struggle to accurately assess the performance and generate insights from their campaigns.

Arcane has created the first 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), who have both helped scale some of the world’s fastest growing tech businesses, and have been developing the platform for the last year and a half.  

Unlike existing horizontal workflow automation platforms, Arcane integrates with content, organic, paid, social and email marketing channels, groups together all of their disconnected data and tasks, and plugs them into one platform. 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. Arcane has identified and mapped out more than 100 tasks its AI co-pilot can complete, capturing the majority of a marketer’s current workload. More tasks are in development. 

Arcane goes further than existing no-code approaches to workflow automation by providing the structure that a non-technical marketer needs most. This is in contrast to the majority of no-code offerings, which direct users to a white space to use tools to build workflows themselves, and require additional engineering support or data science expertise. Arcane’s platform has also incorporated the latest AI technologies, such as LLMs, to allow marketers to ask live questions about their campaigns, with the co-pilot quickly fetching the most relevant data, returning it, and suggesting a best course of action. 

By making their campaigns more efficient, accelerating their decision-making, and freeing up their time for more impactful work, Arcane saves marketers and their businesses crucial time and money. Not only that, it is also improving the quality of the decisions marketers make by keeping them better informed on the real-time performance of their campaigns through data that was previously inaccessible.

Ben Hacking, co-founder and CEO at Arcane, said:

“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. 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.’

Arcane is currently in closed beta but are onboarding waitlist sign-ups in the lead up to an open beta launch later this quarter. You can sign up for the waitlist here: https://tryarcane.com/waitlist

About Arcane

Founded in 2021 by Ben Hacking and Jeremy Frenay, Arcane is an AI-powered co-pilot for marketers. Arcane’s AI assistant has knowledge about how campaigns are performing and automates the marketing teams’ day-to-day tasks – from generating reports to analysing customer sentiment – speeding up workflows and freeing up their time to be spent on more impactful activity. To learn more about Arcane, visit: https://tryarcane.com/