Highlights
- Arena, a communication software developer, raised USD 13.5 million in a Series A funding round.
- Arena uses AI to analyze the data from conversations and interactions to get valuable insights and spot prospective customers.
Arena, a communication software developer and a Slack-like provider of chat or bot conversation column to the right side of the screen when one uses an eCommerce site, is attempting to put more emphasis on human understanding of online marketing and sales. As a result, this will forge a better rapport with prospects for eCommerce businesses.
With the firm’s group chat and messaging application framework for B2C organizations grabbing investors’ attention, it announced a Series A round of funding worth USD 13.5 million, led by CRV with Craft Ventures, Artisanal Ventures, and Vela Partners.
In an interview, Paolo Martins, CEO and founder of Arena, said a crucial marketing trend in 2022 is for consumer businesses to explore more strategies to go beyond social media and third-party cookies to get valuable insights into their customer and users. Arena, which was founded five years back, noticed this early and developed a SaaS platform to replace the need for third-party referrals and social networks.
Martins said it is a no-code communication platform that utilizes engagement data gathered from conversations and analyzes it with Artificial Intelligence (AI) to get better visibility into prospective buyers among its users. Additionally, this platform analyses user sentiments through conversations with customers to spot emotional and behavioral changes and, hence, improve the customer experience.
Forecasting customer movements
“We are creating a real-time engagement for every single website and mobile app. We are helping with a movement by assisting companies such as eCommerce, event organizers, publishers, media, broadcasters, and online educators to bring that conversation to their mobile website, increase engagement and help with the conversion of users (into buyers). We have a data platform that understands the customer behavior, and we can understand and predict the customer’s behavior,” Martins said.
Proclaiming predictability may be a humanizing component, but it is a bold statement.
Founders are Ex-Hulu and Ex-Nasa
Martins was one of the first employees to work with Hulu. He developed ad products to grow the company to achieve seven million subscribers and USD 1.1 billion in revenue during his tenure. With a diverse IT portfolio, Martins also worked with Nasa as a data engineer in Houston, wherein he worked on an algorithm that discovered water and ice on Mar’s surface.
Martin said that this is a crucial moment in the Martech world. Many businesses have transferred their data sourcing tasks from third-party to first-party data due to privacy concerns and conflicts involving Facebook and Apple. With cookies becoming obsolete, consumer brands and enterprises will now concentrate on developing social products and collecting their customer data instead of relying on Google, Facebook, and Amazon to deliver this data, Martins Said.
Since its inception, Arena has concentrated on developing the product-led growth motion and increasing its client base to 25,000 accounts, that too organically, Martins Said. It is a long list of clienteles with big names like Vimeo, Adobe, Asana, Avon, Facebook, Microsoft, Fox Sports, Sony Music, and others.
No-code approach attracts users
Martins said, “We attribute our success to our product-led growth approach because I believe that product engagement is the ultimate weapon to grow. Now we’re helping every website build conversation and understand their customers with just one line of code.”
What does that one-line code include?
“It’s simply a line that connects a site to the APIs. We have a long list of standard ones, plus many others, that can be deployed easily, and you don’t have to be an IT person to do it,” Martins said.
For instance, Arena is making strategic partnerships with Shopify and other e-commerce giants to make an immediate connection.
Angel investor participants in this round include Datadog founder Olivier Pomel and CPO Amit Agarwal, Intercom founder Des Traynor, Shopify former CMO Jeff Weiser, former VP Growth Segment Guillaume Cabane, and former Miro CMO Elena Verna.
Martins said that the funds would be utilized to scale sales and marketing organizations and bring Arena to consumer enterprises looking to enhance engagement and conversions.
According to a recommendation, platform Arena competes in a burgeoning market with My Alice, Voyage, Ai Trillion, Chatra, Friz bit, and several others.
Arena’s business model executes on a per-seat based on interaction volume, Starting at USD 99 per month for SMEs to USD 25000 per month for enterprise deployment.
Experts View:
“We built a scalable and easy-to-install chat solution that focuses on building communities and increasing transactions such as live shopping, subscriptions, and donations. It all comes with our customer data platform that converts into first-party data and deeply understands customer behavior using AI. We understand how customers think and have a pretty good prediction record,” Martins said.