Archive.ai - Automate Marketing Workflows

Archive.ai: Revolutionizing Digital Marketing Through Community Engagement

Paul Benigeri and Geoffrey Woo, previously working in food technology and e-commerce infrastructure, respectively, identified significant inefficiencies in existing digital marketing processes.

They observed that workflows were often manual and repetitive, particularly as businesses adopted a growing number of disconnected marketing tools.

Addressing the Future of Marketing

Driven by a desire to streamline their own operations, Benigeri and Woo established Archive.ai in March. Their core objective is to develop technology that fosters seamless communication between databases and distribution channels.

This approach aims to shift the marketing paradigm from a traditional “talking at you” model to a more collaborative “building with you” strategy.

Initial Product Offerings

Archive.ai currently offers two primary products:

• Archive: A Shopify application designed to automatically identify, categorize, and preserve Instagram Stories related to a specific brand.
• Archive Communities: A platform that enables programmatic influencer marketing, facilitating rapid scaling of community-building initiatives.

Woo, serving as chairman of Archive.ai, articulated via email that the company is pioneering a novel marketing methodology termed “community marketing.”

This concept integrates elements from influencer marketing, affiliate programs, loyalty schemes, and community management.

The Shift Towards Community Marketing

Existing services often operate in isolation, lacking effective interoperability. Furthermore, the implementation of Apple’s privacy changes with iOS 14, which restricted the Facebook tracking pixel, has led to diminished efficiency in paid social media advertising for many e-commerce businesses.

Prior to formal incorporation, the company achieved profitability, according to Woo.

Early Adoption and Growth

Archive.ai’s client base includes Four Sigmatic, Health Via Modern Nutrition (Benigeri’s former employer), and several other prominent brands that remain unnamed at this time.

Currently, over 40 users are participating in the Archive App alpha testing phase, with a waitlist exceeding 200 individuals. The company anticipates a public launch of the Archive App before the end of November.

Securing Venture Capital

To facilitate the development of a “next-generation community marketing technology company,” as described by Woo, the company sought venture capital funding.

Today, Archive.ai announced the successful completion of a $4.068 million funding round, led by Stripe.

Investors and Expansion Plans

Additional investors in the round included Lux Capital, Sugar Capital, and Anti Fund.

Notable individual investors participating were Eric Glyman and Karim Atiyeh (Ramp CEO and CTO), Brian Long and Andrew Jones (Attentive CEO and CPO), Qasar Younis (Applied Intuition CEO), and Clement Delangue (Hugging Face CEO).

The new funding has enabled the company to triple its workforce to 36 employees, and monthly recurring revenue has increased by 58% since April.

Plans are underway to further expand the engineering team, focusing on automation of workflows and the application of machine learning to enhance marketing tasks and decision-making.

Strengthening the Team

Archive.ai has also added Kwan Kim as head of growth, bringing experience from Recurly, where he was the first digital marketing hire and contributed to the company’s acquisition by Accel-KKR in 2020.

Stripe’s Perspective

Chris Sperandio, corporate development lead at Stripe, stated, “Archive provides businesses with a straightforward method to assess and, crucially, comprehend what their customers are expressing – a key metric for any forward-thinking organization.”

He further added, “We are pleased to invest in Archive and, by extension, support the growth of internet-enabled commerce for its users.”