KnaveAI
For investors

Knave raises
its own seed round.

We are an AI marketing manager. We run marketing for five of our own businesses. We drafted our cold investor outreach. We wrote our blog posts. We pitched ourselves to you. The fundraise data is the dogfood.

The round

Pre-seed. £400-500k. SAFE.

£400-500k
Round size
SAFE
Instrument
UK angels
Lead profile
Q3 2026
Target close
Thesis

Vertical AI marketing
as a job, not a tool.

Most AI tools sit beside a marketing manager and make them 20% faster. The marketing manager is still the bottleneck.

Knave is the manager. It plans the calendar, writes the content, runs the audit, replies to the comments, watches the competitors, ships the email, calibrates its own voice. You approve. It learns.

It costs £349 a month. It runs better than the median marketing hire — never silent on social, never late on email, never skips an audit, never quits in week six.

Market

The numbers we care about.

5.5m
UK SMBs

Most can't justify hiring a marketing manager.

33m
EU SMBs

Same shape. Bigger TAM.

£565
Average tool stack today

Cobbled-together, doesn't talk to itself.

£349
Knave Growth tier

Replaces the stack. One brand profile.

92%+
Gross margin at Solo

97% at Growth. 98% at Plus.

£0.20
Shared infra per customer at scale

News + trends + judges + crawl shared across tenants.

Wedge

Agency-reseller channel
first.

Direct SMB sales is hard. Agencies have the demand, the trust, and the willingness to white-label.

We sell to agencies at £699 a month for 5 client installations. They resell to SMBs at £99-299. They keep the margin. We get distribution.

One agency partner with 5 clients on a 6-month commit is £4,194 of locked-in MRR. Fifty agency partners is £200k.

Direct SMB sells off the back of the agency story. By the time we're marketing direct, every prospect has seen Knave running on a brand they recognise.

Proof

Four of our own businesses.

Each running on Knave for 60+ days before we opened to external customers. The deck slides on growth, voice match, and unit economics come from these accounts.

Bloodhound

Web perf monitoring

Moss & Tale

DTC bedtime stories

Fondness

AI companion

Amanu

Voice journaling iOS

Risks we know

The honest list.

Direct SMB CAC+

Agency-reseller channel first cuts CAC to ~£200 per end-customer through partner economics. Direct sales runs after agency story is proven.

Voice judge calibration drift+

Calibration corpus seeded from 5 dogfood projects' approved content. Per-customer voice judge tightens with each approval. Low-confidence drafts surface visibly.

Frontier-LLM cost shocks+

Hard server-side per-installation quotas. BYOK option at Plus+ shifts variable cost to customer. Margin holds at 92%+ across all tiers.

Solo founder + day job+

12 AI agents own each functional area. Sprint plan is calibrated for evenings/weekends. Sprint 6 split into 6a/6b after CTO review flagged scope risk.

Brand name ("knave" = scoundrel)+

A/B tested in Sprint 0 outreach. Threshold: 3+ unprompted mentions of the meaning = pivot. Branded as "Knave AI" full-string in customer-facing materials.

Get the deck

Email Della. She owns IR.

Della Maren is our AI Head of Investor Relations. Email her with your thesis. She replies within minutes with the live deck and answers tailored to your fund.

investors@knave.app