London-based expert network provider Arbolus recently announced that it has closed a $20 mln Series B funding round targeted at helping the firm expand its commercial operations in the US.
Arbolus’ Recent Funding Round
Arbolus’ recent $20 million growth equity investment was led by Kayne Anderson Partners Fund V, which is being sub-advised by Composition Capital, a Los Angeles-based growth stage technology investor. This new capital infusion is expected to enable Arbolus to build out its US commercial operations; develop additional products; and continue its disruption of the expert network and broader information services industries.
Sam Glasswell, CEO and co-founder of Arbolus said of this investment, “Over the past two years, Arbolus has seen exceptional growth in a challenging deals market. This has been driven by a relentless focus on understanding our customers’ needs and developing innovative products to address them. Our video Q&A tool, Canopy, continues to grow in popularity and we’re excited to see this complemented by Arbolus Insights next year and beyond. We are excited to partner with the team at Kayne and Composition to build the industry-leading expert insights platform.”
Leon Chen, Managing Partner and Co-Founder of Composition Capital explained the rationale for this investment, saying “We are thrilled to partner with Arbolus at this pivotal stage in their growth and at such an opportune moment in this industry. As long users of expert networks ourselves, Arbolus’s differentiated and disruptive approach to a critical – but legacy – industry, supported by consistent growth, validates the strength of their offering.”
About Arbolus
The firm’s co-founder Will Leeming, a former AlphaSights employee, formed a holding company, Collective IQ, in 2017 with colleague Sam Glasswell to create an online marketplace for independent consultants. Leeming worked at AlphaSights for six years, at one point heading the firm’s relationships with European consulting firms. The firm was rebranded as Arbolus in 2019.
While Arbolus provides many traditional expert network services (one-on-one calls, surveys, etc), the firm positions its key offering as a technology platform for managing experts and building a network. Users set up projects, manage and make payments to internally sourced experts (supplemented by experts sourced by Arbolus), create transcripts and share results with collaborators.
The platform presents itself as a souped-up CRM designed to facilitate projects. Of course, the firm also offers clients with recommendations of suitable experts, ostensibly relying on artificial intelligence to source the contacts using press releases, social media feeds and company websites to identify people and their areas of expertise. The expert recommendation tool, named Hyperion, also draws on referrals from experts previously identified.
Besides enabling traditional expert calls, a few of Arbolus’s other products include:
- Arbolus Canopy: a video and text-based Q&A tool
- Arbolus Insights: a proprietary database of B2B professionals
- Surveys: clients can run surveys with hard to reach B2B audiences
Our Take
Since the company was founded, Arbolus has raised $44.2 mln in a number of funding rounds including a $1.8 mln seed round closed in June 2019, a £1.2 mln seed investment raised in March, 2020, a $6 mln Series A round closed in March 2021, a £12 mln Series A funding round in April 2022, and the most recent Series B funding round. To date, Arbolus’ principal investors include Fuel Ventures, 13books Capital, Silicon Valley Bank, Plug and Play, and Composition Capital.
According to Inex One’s 2024 Expert Network Market Sizing study, the global expert network industry grew a meager 1% in 2023 to $2.28 billion as Private Equity deals and demand from Consulting clients has slowed in recent years.
Despite this slowdown in the overall industry, Arbolus has been able to gain considerable traction in the marketplace as it has doubled its revenue and increased the size of its team to over 180 staff since its previous capital raise in April 2022. Management explains that much of this growth has been fueled by the take-up of its Canopy video oriented service.
The addition of a significant amount of new capital in the business will undoubtably enable the firm to hire staff and develop new products and tools. However, we would not be surprised to see Arbolus use some of this capital to acquire other small research and technology providers that could enhance the firm’s product offering.
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