Archive is pleased to announce a fresh $8M Seed-2 round led by Tiger Global and Human Capital, with participation from Battery Ventures, Anti Fund, Red Antler, 305 Ventures, and dozens of other executives and leaders from across e-commerce and tech space including Brex COO, Michael Tannenbaum, Extend cofounder, Rohan Shah, and Alloy Automation CEO Sara Du. This new injection of funding comes just a few months after our Seed-1 round led by Stripe, and brings our total funding to over $12M.
The new capital will enable us to accelerate our mission to empower every e-commerce merchant—from startups to household names—to harness their community and grow faster and more efficiently.
Building Community Marketing
We started our careers as e-commerce merchants, so we viscerally understand the pain points that every e-commerce founder and digital marketer faces. The biggest pain point (after making a product) is figuring out how to grow quickly and efficiently. We’ve both spent years experimenting with virtually every marketing tactic, grinding away with manual and rote processes, and trading notes and tips with the top community and digital marketers in the industry. As we collected these insights and experiences, we crystallized that building and scaling community is the holy grail for marketers.
Could we take our hard-won insights and turn it into a technology? We thought we could, so in March 2021, we started Archive and began writing software to automate and streamline marketing tasks, community building, and scaling operations.
Now less than a year later, we’re one of the fastest growing e-commerce enablement startups in history and in the last month we’ve achieved #1 trending app in the Shopify app store. We’re honored that digital marketing teams from over 500+ companies have entrusted us with their business.
“Archive stood out immediately to our team at Human Capital because of their clear understanding and meaningful results building communities through the channels that are defining the next era of commerce.”
Armaan Ali of Human Capital.
“Their previous experience building in the space is a foundation that will help the next wave of e-commerce grow more efficiently and we are excited to be a partner on this journey.”
For the last five years, digital marketing has stagnated with a rinse-and-repeat of dated playbooks for landing page optimization and expensive paid social and paid search campaigns. The best brands know that there is very little juice left to squeeze here. Today these top brands are able to tap into a cultural movement to mobilize and harness their communities. An authentic, vibrant community is more powerful than any old-school institutional marketing approach.
Archive is at the forefront of creating the digital marketing software infrastructure to do this at scale. We call this new category community marketing. Community marketing harnesses what customers and influencers are saying about you, and enables merchants to turn that user-generated content into full-fledged campaigns that are critical for growth in this meta of digital advertising.
Our two products are now some of the most important tools in the modern digital marketer’s toolset:
- Archive App, which launched last month, is the only Shopify App that automatically detects & saves Instagram posts, stories, and reels that brands get tagged in. Oftentimes, hundreds of assets a day are created and then lost in a span of just 24 hours. This is massively wasteful and the Archive App empowers marketers to take what used to be a menial and time-consuming process and fully streamline it with an automated approach.
Francesca Morfini, brand marketing director at Tuft + Paw, says:
“We have been using Archive App for a few months now at Tuft + Paw and we’re extremely happy with the results.Our marketing operations have been a lot more smooth and it’s much easier to get the right assets from our customers who are posting about the products they’ve ordered. Social media is a huge part of our marketing strategy - since we’re selling products for cats, it’s hard to create good content as cats don’t like new environments - that’s why social media posts from our customers are vital.”
- Archive Communities is our software platform that enables brands to build and scale in-house communities. All too often influencer, affiliate, and community engagement is manual and bespoke - but for the next wave of e-commerce growth, it is critical that merchants enable software to empower their marketing teams to scale like other channels of the business.
Archive's Communities has helped customers like H.V.M.N. cut their creative costs by over 75% while also lowering their Facebook CPAs by 25%. Most importantly, during this period of utilizing the platform H.V.M.N.'s micro-influencer community garnered over 5K posts - which is more than 25x more saved than they had before they started working with our team.
What’s Next at Archive
We’re more motivated than ever to help merchants of all sizes to harness the power of community marketing. We are looking to grow the team by 2.5x over the next 12 months. Since we started the company in March 2021, we’ve grown to almost 40 team members, and in order to support our growing customer base, we’re hiring the very best commerce & marketing thinkers and builders. We are currently focused on bringing in world-class talent in the growth, product engineering, and partnerships teams over the coming weeks and months. Here are our open roles!
Archive App will also have a lot of added features being built out this year, including machine learning powered labeling, automatic content rights acquisition, and more. We’re already alpha testing TikTok integration with customers, and we’ll be building integrations with every platform your customers and communities are on.
We’ve yet to hit our first birthday, and we’re off to a heady start. We don’t anticipate slowing down any time soon. Join us as we re-imagine digital marketing.
If you’d like to learn more about how Archive can work with your organization, please get in touch at partner@archive.com
