Duel, the leading Brand Advocacy platform helping leading retail brands including Lush, ELEMIS, Victoria’s Secret and Abercrombie & Fitch grow through their own fan and creator communities instead of traditional advertising, has raised $16 million in a Series A round. The funding was co-led by Molten Ventures and Bright Pixel, alongside existing investor Peter Bauer, founder of Mimecast.
Duel empowers brands to drive sustainable growth by activating their most powerful marketing asset: their existing brand fans. It enables brands to recruit, activate, and grow fully owned networks of creators – including professionals, amateurs and emerging talent – from their everyday customers who then generate authentic content, influence purchasing behaviour, and drive referrals across every social platform with personalised storefronts. The result is a measurable, always-on advocacy engine that turns real customers into a scalable growth channel.
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The funding will fuel Duel’s growth across the US following its recent expansion to New York, expand its Enterprise AI-driven capabilities, and cement Brand Advocacy as the go-to philosophy for building today’s most successful retail brands.
Paul Archer, CEO and co-founder of Duel, explains: “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.
“We know from our own data that between a fifth and a third of a brand’s customers are already active creators, so at Duel, we help brands recruit, activate, and scale these authentic voices, turning everyday customers into powerful advocates who fuel measurable growth.”
At the core of Duel’s solution is its Advocate Relationship Management platform – the single system of record for every type of advocate, from customers and creators to ambassadors and employees. It enables brands to track, engage, and reward advocacy behaviours in one unified platform and to run programs at scale, managing tens of thousands of advocates with the same resources that once supported only a few hundred.
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Nicola McClafferty, Partner at Molten Ventures, says: “Duel is rewriting the playbook for how brands grow in the modern world. Performance marketing has become expensive, impersonal, and often ineffective. Duel provides an alternative that is better aligned to how consumers discover and engage with brands, and can transform the way that brands are built and marketed. We’re thrilled to support Duel as they build a new category and reshape how modern brands grow.”
Miguel Bagulho, Investment Director at Bright Pixel Capital, the tech investment arm of Sonae Group, adds: “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. Duel is championing this shift, turning advocacy into a systematic, scalable strategy. We believe Brand Advocacy will become one of the defining growth drivers of the next decade, not just in retail but across every sector and Bright Pixel is proud to back Paul and the Duel team as they lead this transformation.”
Duel’s long-term vision extends beyond retail, aiming to make Brand Advocacy the standard philosophy for building companies across all industries, from B2B to music, hospitality, professional services, and entertainment.
Archer concludes: “Many companies still think they control their brand, when in reality it lives in the conversations happening every day among millions of customers on social media. The brands winning today are the ones that earn it – they loosen their grip, humanise themselves, and empower fans to carry the brand forward. Those that don’t do this won’t survive the decade.
“We give ambitious brands the system and expertise to turn that everyday advocacy into their most powerful growth channel – and with this investment, we’re only just getting started.”
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Source: businesswire
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