Arcanum

Arcanum AI is a Wellington, New Zealand technology company that develops Numa, described by the company as an AI operating system rather than a chatbot, aimed at small and medium-sized businesses in construction and trades, professional services, manufacturing and engineering consulting. Numa connects to the systems customers already use — the company cites Microsoft 365, Google Workspace and Xero — and lets non-technical staff configure custom AI agents that handle repetitive work without writing code.

Published use cases include drafting quotes directly from plans and drawings, a meeting assistant and document processor, data analysis over connected business systems, reporting, sales and support email handling, and a knowledge assistant that searches across documents, emails and files. Industry-specific applications described by the company include compliance and health-and-safety reporting checked against building codes, subcontractor document review, technical specification drafting, proposal and RFP responses, contract analysis, bills of materials and purchase order drafting, job costing, job scheduling optimisation and maintenance report generation from voice input.

The business began in 2016 as a professional services company delivering R&D and AI projects for large organisations, including banks and energy companies, before shifting toward packaged SaaS products built on pre-trained generative models. An earlier generation of the offering was marketed as AI assistants for back-office functions such as finance, customer support and human resources, including an invoice-processing assistant named Archie that worked in Outlook and pushed invoices into Xero.

Founding story

Arcanum was founded in Wellington in 2016 by Asa Cox, who had spent 15 years in pharmaceutical business development and licensing in the UK before relocating to New Zealand in 2008 and later working in technology in Canada and Silicon Valley. The company describes its inception as arising from conversations about machine learning and business development over a coffee and a beer in Wellington, at a point when AI was still largely unfamiliar to businesses.

Business model

Arcanum sells software to businesses, having transitioned from an AI professional services and R&D consultancy model into SaaS products, most recently the Numa platform, supported by demo-led sales and free resources such as an AI readiness assessment, an AI adoption canvas and an implementation template.

Software sold to business customers; the sources do not state pricing.

Traction

The company reports that in the 90 days preceding the site snapshot Numa handled more than 27,500 conversations, with over 1,600 agents built by customers, more than 630 active users and over 325 systems connected. Customer-reported outcomes include a 15% reduction in admin management time at Momentum Consulting, heavy administrative tasks falling from two weeks to under two days at PCL, a 50% improvement in cost of sales at AV Media, and quotes within about 1% of estimator pricing at Flowerday Homes. Construction customers are said to save an estimated 4.2 hours per active user per month, 1.9x the platform average.

Latest developments

The company's current offering is Numa, an AI operating system for SMBs with industry-specific solutions for construction and trades, professional services, manufacturing and engineering consulting, reporting customer-built agent counts and usage metrics over a recent 90-day period.