Arena Scores $13.6 Million Series A

<p><strong>SAN FRANCISCO<&sol;strong> &&num;8211&semi; <a href&equals;"http&colon;&sol;&sol;www&period;arena&period;im">Arena <&sol;a>&&num;8211&semi; a communication software platform to enable real-time conversations and encourage customer engagement &&num;8211&semi; announced a &dollar;13&period;6 million Series A round led by <a href&equals;"http&colon;&sol;&sol;www&period;crv&period;com">CRV<&sol;a> with Craft Ventures&comma; Artisanal Ventures and Vela Partners also participating&period; Angel investors participating in this round include Datadog founder Olivier Pomel and CPO Amit Agarwal&comma; Intercom founder Des Traynor&comma; Shopify former CMO Jeff Weiser&comma; former VP Growth Segment Guillaume Cabane and former Miro CMO Elena Verna&period;<&sol;p>&NewLine;<p>As more online brands and consumer companies look for ways to move beyond social media and third-party cookies as a way of gaining more direct insights about their users and customers&comma; Arena is leading the movement away from third party sites and social networks with its no-code communication platform that uses engagement data gained from conversations and combines that with AI to better understand who might want to buy what among its customers&period;<&sol;p>&NewLine;<p>The company was founded by Paulo Martins who was previously one of the first employees at Hulu where he built ad products and growth to help scale the company to 7 million subscribers and &dollar;1&period;1 billion in revenue&period; Martins was also a former data engineer at NASA where he worked on the algorithm that discovered water and ice on Mars&&num;8217&semi;s surface&period;<&sol;p>&NewLine;<p>&OpenCurlyDoubleQuote;We built a scalable and easy-to-install chat solution that focuses on building communities and increasing transactions such as live shopping&comma; subscriptions&comma; and donations&period; It all comes with our customer data platform that converts into first-party data and deeply understands customer behavior using AI&&num;8221&semi; said Martins&comma; who also serves as CEO&period;  &&num;8220&semi;We&&num;8217&semi;re leading the social&plus; movement and helping companies to integrate conversation and shopping experiences into their products helping to transform the future of ecommerce&comma; streaming&comma; education and online communities&period;&&num;8221&semi;<&sol;p>&NewLine;<p>The funding comes at a key moment in the world of martech&period; Due to privacy and conflicts between Facebook and Apple&comma; many companies have shifted their data sourcing activity from third-party to first-party data&period;  With the end of the cookie era&comma; brands and consumer enterprises will focus on building social products and gathering their own customer data rather than relying on the Googles&comma; Facebooks&comma; Amazons of this world to provide the information&period;<&sol;p>&NewLine;<p>Since the launch&comma; the company has focused on building the product-led growth motion and expanding its customer base to 25&comma;000 accounts&comma; all organically&period; Now that the company has acquired Fortune 500 customers&comma; the new funds will be dedicated to moving the company up-market to follow the high enterprise demand&period;<&sol;p>&NewLine;