Digital marketing is a booming, multi-hundred billion-dollar industry driven by increased demand for automation. However, marketers underutilise their martech stack capabilities, due to workflow fragmentation across numerous disconnected platforms and tools. They spend significant time on mundane, repetitive tasks, and build hacky automation workflows, that limit their capacity to focus on the strategic and creative work that drives real value for their business.
This is why are excited to back Arcane, an AI-powered co-pilot that aims to provide each marketer with the power of a team. Acting as an assistant, Arcane’s tool enables marketing professionals to focus on the strategic, creative aspect of work that they excel at.
Founders Ben Hacking (ex-Deliveroo, ex-WeWork) and Jeremy Frenay (ex-Babylon), who have helped scale some of the world’s fastest-growing tech businesses, were inspired to start Arcane after experiencing firsthand the difficulties marketers face in modern workflows. The Arcane team has identified and mapped out over 100 discrete tasks capturing the majority of a marketer’s current workload. These include repurposing blog content for social channels, building competitor reports, and analysing and reporting metrics to teams.
Arcane’s co-pilot has knowledge about how campaigns are performing and automates the marketing teams’ day-to-day tasks. From generating reports to analysing customer sentiment, it speeds up workflows and frees up their time to be spent on more impactful activities, such as reviewing, refining, and actioning the output of a wide range of high-value tasks.
Ben Hacking, co-founder and CEO at Arcane, highlights:
“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 in a no-code platform that captures more of marketers’ repetitive activities, giving them time back to focus on higher impact tasks.”
We are excited to participate in Aracane’s $5 million seed round led by Accel and be on the journey alongside Cocoa, Firstminute Capital, Kima Ventures, and 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. The total funding includes a previously unannounced $1 million pre-seed round led by us.
Arcane plans to expand its engineering and data teams, and further develop the platform’s AI functionalities ahead of its open beta later this year.
Currently, in closed beta, the company is onboarding waitlist sign-ups in the lead-up to an open beta launch later this quarter. To learn more about Arcane and to sign up for the waitlist, visit tryarcane.com/waitlist
From the launch of Fund VI in May to welcoming 39 new companies to the Seedcamp Nation, and introducing new products designed specifically for our founders – 2023 has been the year the Seedcamp Nation reached new heights.
Our networked approach reached new heights in May when we launched Seedcamp VI, our largest and most ambitious fund to date. With $180M in capital commitments and backed by over 200 investors, we are doubling down on our 15+ year track record of investing in Europe’s brightest entrepreneurial talent from Angel to Seed rounds.
To better serve the needs of our founders and their teams, we launched two exciting new products centered around the network and the flywheel effects of the Seedcamp Nation:
(1) The Seedcamp Talent Network – A growing community of pre-vetted entrepreneurial talent looking to join the founding teams of our portfolio that our founders can access at the click of a button. Find out more and join here.
(2) The Seedcamp Expert Collective – A community of 100 top-quality operators who have scaled some of the world’s most successful businesses including the likes of Uber, Stripe, Cloudflare, Revolut, Deliveroo, NextDoor, Skyscanner, and Wise. They provide support to our community of founders and their teams in navigating the critical first steps in building a business.
Over the past 12 months, we welcomed 87 new founders to the Seedcamp Nation, representing 39 new portfolio companies. They are building across a wide array of industries and verticals, ranging from an AI governance platform to techbio.
With a vibrant and expanding Seedcamp Nation, our founder community continues to grow from strength to strength despite a challenging macroenvironment. We are excited to see new collaborations among portfolio companies, such as Thriva and Habitual partnering with Lindus Health to deliver clinical trials, Liveblocks powering the collaborative platforms of Rayon and Fullview, and a number of companies using Outverse as their community solution.
Synthesia officially hit unicorn status with their $90M Series C announced in June. They are the 10th company in our portfolio to achieve this milestone! When we first backed Victor Riparbelli, Steffen Tjerrild, Dr. Lourdes Agapito, and Dr. Matthias Niessner in early 2019 (well ahead of the GenAI hype of today), we sensed they were onto something big with their use of AI for video generation. We’re hugely impressed by the team’s ability to deliver a best-in-class product to a whopping 47% of Fortune 100 companies.
Last but not least, our co-founder and Managing Partner Reshma Sohoni made the Forbes’ The Midas Seed List (#8) and for the second time consecutively The Midas List: Top Tech Investors (#97); and our Managing Partner Carlos Espinal represents our team on Forbes’ The Midas List Europe (#18) for our investment in Synthesia.
Our team is already excited to partner and support Europe’s most promising founders in 2024.
Looking for funding? Our team would love to see what you’re building!
AskUI: a startup that aims to build the next era of process automation by leveraging the power of AI
Cakewalk: a SaaS Identity and Access Management for SMBs solution that helps fast-growing companies to regain control over the software applications they use
Doorfeed: an end-to-end acquisition platform for real estate buyers
Dust: an AI startup aiming to improve team productivity by breaking down internal silos, surfacing important knowledge, and providing tools to build custom internal apps
Enzai: AI governance platform that allows organisations to adopt best-in-class AI governance policies and measure against them
Faks: an all-in-one sales platform connecting labs and pharmacies
Fifth Dimension AI: an AI Co-Pilot for real estate deals, data, and documents
Flagcat: a webtoon studio, producing original series designed for worldwide distribution
Integration.app: an AI-powered integration stack for SaaS products that aims to be the catalyst for deeper connectivity across the SaaS ecosystem
Kern AI: a platform designed for developers who want to implement data-centric NLP solutions
Koios: a voice-driven AI platform set to drastically reduce cost and friction in the personality and management insights market
Kubeark: an enterprise-grade container and application management
Plumery: a digital engagement platform that helps banks implement digital programs
Trezy: a fintech that provides an AI-driven suite of real-time financial forecasting tools for SMEs
Twig: a techbio company that produces sustainable molecules through engineered biology
Verisian: a startup on a mission to increase the rate at which human health improves by redefining clinical trial analysis and drug approvals
26 companies are still in stealth working on solving a range of problems from using AI to detect autism to drug safety and even a Liquid Brain (you read that right!). Keep an eye out for new announcements in 2024!
Synthesia secures $90M for AI that generates custom avatars
Microsoft co-founder’s venture arm contributes to Curve’s £58M funding boost – Series C now at £133M
Sylvera banks $57M to put carbon offsetting on a path to Net Zero
Superscript, a bespoke insurance provider for SMEs, raises $54 million
Peppy secures a $45M Series B to expand its B2B2C health services platform to the US
Lindus Health, a UK clinical trials startup backed by Peter Thiel, raises $18M
It’s official: Griffin is a bank!
Roblox acquires voice moderation startup Speechly
Accel’s Philippe Botteri on His Key Learnings in VC Investment and the Potential of Generative AI [🎙 TMIK]
Pleo’s CTO Meri Williams on Scaling Engineering, Open Source, and Risks and Opportunities of GenAI, featuring Meri Williams, CTO at Pleo [🎙TMIK]
The Impact of AI Innovations and Why We Need to Prioritise Responsible AI, featuring Aaron Rosenberg, Partner at Radical Ventures [🎙️TMIK]
How to Lay the Foundation For Your Startup Brand, featuring Joanna Christie, previously a VP of Brand & Marketing at our portfolio company Gaia Family [🎙️Seedcamp Firsts]
How to Build Your Early Engineering Team: Selecting Engineers & Sourcing Engineering Talent, by David Mytton, Seedcamp Expert in Residence [Seedcamp Firsts]
How to set up a fully remote and distributed team. Lessons from Maze and Gitlab , featuring April Hoffbauer, VP of People at our portfolio company Maze [🎙️Seedcamp Firsts]
How to create and scale an iconic community. Lessons from Sorare, featuring Dan O’Kelly, an early Community Lead at Seedcamp-backed fantasy sports unicorn Sorare [🎙Seedcamp Firsts]
Risk / Reward Framework for AI, by our Managing Partner Carlos Espinal and our Associate Will Bennett
Diving into Culture Across Remote and In-Office Environments, featuring Bretton Putter, CEO of CultureGene
AI, ML, and Seedcamp’s commitments to date, by our Associate Will Bennett
Hiring benchmarks pre-Series A: Data from across the Seedcamp portfolio, by our Associate Will Bennett and our Talent Manager James Wright
Talent is top of mind for founders, especially at the earliest stages of company building. For many years, Talent has been a core pillar of our support to founders and we permanently fine-tune our offering around this.
Our new Talent Manager James Wright joined us in March. Since then he has directly supported 51 companies across the portfolio.
This year, Engineering and Sales talent remains the main topic of conversation and the priority for our founders across the portfolio. Whilst overall demand for hiring has slowed this year, Engineering hiring remains the most challenging to attract the top 1%. If you’re an Engineer or Sales Superstar looking to join a Pre-Seed or Seed stage startup, make sure to apply to our Talent Network to be the first profiles our founders meet with!
We haven’t quite reached the end of the year yet, but thus far our job board has generated an impressive 12,293 candidate applications across our portfolio. For many of our earlier stage companies, gaining visibility with these candidates makes the difference in bringing the best talent to the table. There are over 700 jobs across the portfolio right now and you can take a look here.
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