Written by Alex Bredeen
We are delighted to announce Arbolus have raised $6m from Fuel Ventures for an AI-driven platform putting collaboration at the heart of the Future of Work
Arbolus’s $6m investment has been led by early-stage UK VC, Fuel Ventures as well as Plug and Play, one of the most active VCs in Silicon Valley. The 3-year old tech startup has seen speedy growth achieving 7x YoY. In the last year the team has expanded internationally with its headquarters in Barcelona and a satellite office in New York. Arbolus has ambitious plans to expand its US operations further due to the success that has already been achieved.
Who are Arbolus?
Arbolus is a platform that eliminates the barriers between those with experience and those who seek it. Founded in 2018 by Sam Glasswell and Will Leeming, two entrepreneurs with previous experience of helping scale a $1bn company. Arbolus is changing the way knowledge is used in companies. Currently Arbolus is working with more than 80 customers, including some of the largest firms in the world such as Big Four KPMG, leading global strategy consultancies as well as some of the world’s most innovative companies such as UiPath. The company is looking to extend its reach into the enterprise market and is eager to scale to $100m revenue by 2024.
The startup also recently appointed a new CTO, Pau Beltran, who has over 15 years of machine learning and NLP experience from Disney, eDreams, OneMind and others. Pau and his team will be focused on further developing the natural language processing and AI backbone of the Arbolus platform.
Why Arbolus?
The world’s leading companies in the UK alone spend around $60bn a year on using outside experts to drive their business forward, but rarely retain or repurpose this knowledge in other areas of the organisation. As experts and consultants are brought in by big corporations, Arbolus is delivering the future of work through innovative tools that support and facilitate the knowledge sharing process. The $6m investment will be used to scale the platform to serve large enterprises, consultancies and investment firms.
The future of work is increasingly based around collaboration, experts are brought in to plug the gaps of knowledge when it comes to businesses researching new markets, developing products, defining new strategies and differentiating from the competition. Arbolus helps large organisations build valuable expert networks and retain knowledge by delivering a unique toolset built on AI and natural language processing capabilities in order to make collaboration and knowledge sharing easier, thereby maximising the value offered by the experts.
Sam Glasswell, CEO and co-founder of Arbolus, said, “Having the right information gives you a competitive edge but the typical means of engaging with experts through one hour calls alone is failing to deliver value. These interviews are usually held by a single department and their findings end up lost in PowerPoint presentations or reports. Therefore, companies are only building up a short-term view. We are bringing innovation to the ways companies are working with external experts by using groundbreaking technology to, not just build expertise within organizations, but deliver it in ways that are digestible, searchable and, most importantly, usable for the months and years ahead across different departments.”
Mark Pearson, Managing Partner from Fuel Ventures added, “Arbolus have done amazing things in its first 24 months and it's a testament to the entrepreneurial ambition of Sam and Will backed up by their experience of helping to scale a $1bn company in their former lives. We want to foster the innovation and disruption Arbolous is bringing to an old-fashioned industry and be the leaders in connecting the dots between the expert used and the information they provide.”
Saeed Amidi, CEO & Founder at Plug and Play said, “When we first met Arbolus, we immediately knew that their solution was a game-changer. Sam and Will have 20 years combined experience in the expert interview industry so they knew clients' pains and what processes needed to be improved. We decided to support Arbolus’ goal to create the most agile platform in freelance collaboration and are amazed by the milestones achieved by Will and Sam so far. We are looking forward to enhancing their effort by creating the right synergies with our global network.
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