Artesian, which provides cloud-based social customer relationship management to help businesses better connect with consumers, is to use the Series A investment to increase its sales and marketing operations.

Additionally, the funds are to be utilised to increase spending in engineering, new product development and service delivery to existing customers.

Andrew Yates, chief executive officer and co-founder of Artesian, comments, ‘This investment will allow us to drive a significant gear-change in our sales, marketing and engineering efforts. which means that we’ll be able to target customers in new sectors in entirely new ways.

‘With this support, we will now have the financial resources to fully express our vision for this exciting market.’

The Berkshire-headquartered business is reportedly growing by 200 per cent year-on-year and featured in the Deloitte Fast 500 of fasting growing technology companies in Europe. Customers include Barclays, Santander, Aviva and HSBC.

For Octopus the deal means that Artesian will sit alongside the likes of property sales and lettings website Zoopla, snack delivery service Graze.com and software business TouchType in the venture capital firms portfolio. The firm, which was founded in 2000, currently has £2.3 billion in assets under management.

Luke Hakes, principal in the Ventures division at Octopus, adds, ‘Artesian is helping a wide variety of companies understand that successful sales and marketing requires more than just knowledge about products and services.

‘Octopus invests in teams we can believe in, rather than focusing on specific sectors, so, having looked carefully at the level of customised intelligence that Artesian already provides to large enterprises, and on meeting the extremely talented team at Artesian, their potential was clear to us.’