SaaS firm Duel raises £11.9m led by Molten Ventures with Bright Pixel Capital
At a glance
This article covers a Series A round on 23 September 2025 for Duel, a London-based Brand Advocacy platform helping retail brands grow through fan and creator communities, founded by Paul Archer. The company raised £11.9m in the round, led by Molten Ventures with Bright Pixel Capital as a key backer.
What does Duel do?
Duel is a brand advocacy platform that records and manages advocates, creators, ambassadors and customers for retail brands. It enables brands to recruit, activate and reward advocates who create content, influence purchases and refer customers.
Why is Duel useful?
Problem
Retail brands struggle to grow because advertising is expensive, impersonal and often ineffective. Brands cannot easily recruit, manage, or reward customer creators at scale to turn fans into measurable growth.
Solution
Duel explains that it helps brands recruit, activate and scale networks of customer creators using an Advocate Relationship Management platform. It tracks, engages, rewards advocates, and runs programmes at scale to drive measurable customer referrals and growth.
How much did Duel raise?
Duel raised £11.9m ($16m) in a Series A, co-led by Molten Ventures and Bright Pixel Capital alongside existing backers. This makes it the 18th largest funding round in September 2025 (41 recorded). As of 23 September 2025, the round is the 125th largest of the year (448 total) in the Startupmag database.
For details on how Startupmag compiles its rankings, view our Methodology.
Who invested in Duel?
The key investors were:
- Molten Ventures: A leading European venture capital firm that backs high-growth technology companies across enterprise SaaS, AI, deeptech and consumer technology.
- Bright Pixel Capital: The technology investment arm of Sonae, focused on cybersecurity, infrastructure software, retail technologies and business applications, supporting companies from early to growth stages.
- Peter Bauer: An angel investor with a background in cybersecurity and best known as the founder of Mimecast.
In the funding announcement, Nicola McClafferty from Molten Ventures said:
Duel is rewriting the playbook for how brands grow in the modern world. Performance marketing has become expensive, impersonal, and often ineffective.
The investor believes Duel provides an alternative that is better aligned to how consumers discover and engage with brands, can change how brands are built and marketed, and that Molten's support will help the company build a new category and reshape modern brand growth.
In the funding announcement, Miguel Bagulho from Bright Pixel Capital said:
What we see within our retailers and brand partners today is clear: the old model of short-term, transactional campaigns is losing effectiveness. The brands driving the strongest growth are those building durable communities and creating long-term value through their customers.
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Who founded Duel?
Paul Archer is the founder of Duel.
In the funding announcement, Paul Archer said:
In today’s hyper connected world in which social media is now twice the size of all other media channels combined and entirely user-generated, the most successful brands are the ones investing in people and in community, not in ads. Because the truth is, a brand’s best marketers aren’t on their payroll – they’re the customers already out there sharing and recommending the products they love.
The company added it knows from its data that between a fifth and a third of a brand's customers are already active creators, and that Duel helps brands recruit, activate and scale these voices to turn everyday customers into advocates.
Where is Duel based?
Duel is based in London, UK.
What sector is Duel in?
Duel operates in the SaaS sector. SaaS sector provides software hosted online and accessed by customers via the internet. It means businesses rent software through a website instead of buying and installing it.
Key trends and challenges in SaaS:
AI feature integration
Generative AI is being added across products, for example code assistants and automated summaries, increasing differentiation and compute costs.
Rising customer acquisition costs and churn
Sales and marketing costs are rising, so firms focus on making the product drive sign-ups and on expanding existing customer spend.
Data privacy and security compliance
New privacy laws and security expectations increase costs, for example GDPR, CPRA, and stricter cloud controls.
For a deeper look at innovation in this space, see the latest funded SaaS startups in the UK
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