The studio that turns "request a demo" into "try it right now."
Somewhere right now a buyer clicks a button on a website and the software just… runs. No calendar link. No "a rep will reach out." No 40-minute call to watch someone else move a mouse. The buyer pans, zooms, clicks a hotspot, and decides for themselves whether the thing is any good. That little interactive walkthrough is an Arcade, and roughly 14,000 companies now make them.
Arcade is a San Francisco software company with about 98 people and one stubborn idea: the best salesperson for a product is the product itself. It builds the tooling that lets go-to-market teams record their software, polish it without code, and drop a clickable demo anywhere a buyer might be looking. The demos are called arcades, which is either charming or on-the-nose depending on your mood.
"The whole goal of our product is that you allow the customers to try before they buy."
Buying software used to involve a strange ritual. You wanted to see the product. The company wanted you to want to see the product. So they put a wall between you and it, labeled the wall "Request a Demo," and made you fill out a form to find out whether the thing you were already interested in actually worked.
The polite fiction was that this protected the buyer. It mostly protected the funnel. Product marketers, meanwhile, were stuck: a real interactive demo took engineering time nobody had, and a screen-recorded video aged badly the moment the UI changed. The choice was a stale video or a sales call. Neither let the buyer actually touch the product.
"Arcade started with interactive demos, but long term, it's about supporting the customer journey."
That gap - between wanting to try software and being allowed to - is the tension Arcade was built to close. Everything the company has shipped since is a version of removing that wall.
Caroline Clark spent years at Atlassian, where she was an early go-to-market member on Jira Service Desk - a place that famously grew by earning customer trust one honest step at a time, not by gatekeeping the product. Before that she sat on the other side of the table, in venture at Sequoia and Lightspeed, watching which companies actually converted interest into use. In 2021 she left investing to build.
Her co-founder, Rich Manalang, was a fellow Atlassian and became Arcade's technical engine as CTO. Charlie McGeorge signed on as the founding software engineer. The bet was narrow and a little contrarian: that the most valuable thing in a sales cycle is letting someone experience the product, and that this experience could be manufactured in minutes by a marketer with a Chrome extension rather than weeks by an engineering team.
Ex-Atlassian (early Jira Service Desk GTM) and former investor at Sequoia and Lightspeed. Left venture to build the demo she always wished she had.
Former Atlassian colleague and the technical force behind Arcade's recording, editing, and AI tooling.
Clark's years at Atlassian - earning customers' trust step by step - are exactly what inspired Arcade. The product just makes that trust faster to give.
The mechanics are almost suspiciously simple. You capture a product flow with the Chrome extension or desktop app. Then, inside Creator Studio, you add the things that make a recording feel alive - pan and zoom, hotspots, callouts, custom variables, branching paths, and synthetic AI voiceovers. No code, no engineering ticket. Then you embed it on a website, drop it into an email, or share it as a link.
Record any product flow in a browser or app, including mobile recording.
Pan/zoom, hotspots, branching, custom variables and callouts - all without engineering.
AI-assisted narration and content generation to personalize demos at scale.
Engagement metrics and Salesforce sync tie demo views back to real pipeline.
The genius isn't the recording. It's that the marketer never has to ask engineering for permission again.
There's a Figma plugin for designers, integrations with Salesforce and Intercom, and exports for nearly any channel. The throughline: meet the buyer wherever they already are, and let them play.
Atlassian colleagues Caroline Clark and Rich Manalang start Arcade and launch a private beta of interactive demos.
Upfront Ventures leads, with Sequoia, Bond and angels. Arcade ships "try before you buy" capabilities.
Foundation Capital's Joanne Chen leads; angels include Front's Mathilde Collin and Shippo's Laura Behrens Wu. Beta already counted 1,000+ companies and 4,000 demos.
Kleiner Perkins (Mamoon Hamid) leads, with Foundation and Upfront returning. Total raised reaches $21.5M.
New editing studio and AI content generation push Arcade from demos toward broader product storytelling - now 14,000+ companies.
Letting people touch the product before buying turns out to be good business - for the customer doing the buying and the team doing the selling. Arcade points to results across its user base, and they are the kind that survive a skeptical read.
"Zapier saw 80% more booked meetings. Rudderstack doubled pipeline. Wrike lifted conversion 65%."
Customers range from developer platforms to enterprise tools - Zapier, Red Hat, New Relic, Rudderstack, and Wrike among them. The common thread is teams that would rather show their software than describe it.
Ask Clark what Arcade is really for and the answer drifts past "demos." The mission she repeats is about storytelling - giving go-to-market teams the ability to show a product in motion, beautifully, without waiting on anyone. The demo was just the first chapter. The longer arc is the whole customer journey: onboarding, education, support, every moment a person needs to understand what a product does.
"Empower teams to be great storytellers."
It's a worldview as much as a product. If buyers learn best by doing, then the job of marketing isn't to describe software - it's to hand someone the controls and get out of the way.
Software buying is sliding toward self-serve, and AI is making the demo itself something that can be generated, personalized, and updated automatically. Arcade is betting that the "schedule a call to see the product" button has a shelf life - and that the companies who win will be the ones brave enough to just show their work.
Go back to that buyer at the top of the page, the one who clicked a button and watched the software run. A few years ago that click would have produced a form and a wait. Now it produces the product. The wall labeled "Request a Demo" is still standing on plenty of websites. Arcade's whole job is to make it look, increasingly, like a relic.
The old demo made you ask permission to be sold to. The new one just lets you in.