Alembic, a startup that applies pandemic-era contact tracing arithmetic to marketing attribution, at this time introduced a $14 million Sequence A funding spherical led by leisure mogul Jeffrey Katzenberg’s agency WndrCo. 

The spherical comes amid rising demand from Fortune 500 chief marketing officers for AI-powered instruments to measure return on funding from huge marketing budgets more and more unfold throughout digital channels.

“We regularly ask Fortune 500 CMOs about their prime challenges. The most typical response is round proving the effectiveness of marketing spend,” WndrCo associate Justin Wexler instructed VentureBeat in an unique interview. He added, “It’s actually in the DNA of WndrCo to attach progressive expertise with a few of the most forward-leaning CMOs.”

Predicting the way forward for gross sales

Alembic’s software program traces marketing campaigns to gross sales outcomes, attributing income and predicting future ROI throughout TV, radio, podcasts, social media, and different unstructured information sources. The startup applies strategies initially developed throughout COVID-19 to hint causes and patterns in disparate public well being datasets.

“You’ll be able to give it some thought as an enormous level the place each human is any individual you can join the dots with,” stated Alembic founder and CEO Tomas Puig. “What we do is predict the place the connections will happen [using] large quantities of information.” 

This “contact tracing” of information factors occurs in real-time, a serious benefit over marketing combine fashions that may take months to provide outcomes. 

“Folks name me the nerdiest CMO they ever met. These issues are simply as exhausting as any of the large information issues anybody else is tackling, perhaps much more so as a result of it’s on the intersection of each artwork and science,” Puig instructed VentureBeat.

The search for measurable ROI

Early clients deploying Alembic embrace graphics chipmaker Nvidia, water sports activities model North Sails, and Texas A&M athletics. The funding will assist Alembic purchase extra engineering expertise and broaden its product lineup.

“There’s trillions and trillions of {dollars} spent yearly in model marketing,” Katzenberg instructed VentureBeat. “And for essentially the most half, there’s truly no exhausting information that’s proof of ROI.”

“Deploying AI permits corporations to extend productiveness in methods not doable earlier than,” Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of NVIDIA, instructed VentureBeat in an announcement. “Alembic is utilizing AI developed for scientific analysis purposes to foretell ROI from marketing. NVIDIA marketing is utilizing Alembic with nice success.”

Alembic’s method aligns with rising CMO frustration over the lack to concretely measure marketing effectiveness and join spend to gross sales outcomes. Katzenberg, who has evaluated a number of attribution options unsuccessfully in the previous, believes Alembic’s expertise holds world-changing potential. 

“Someplace between the which means of life, the Holy Grail, and the Fountain of Youth is ‘I spent a greenback, however does it truly produce something?,’” stated Katzenberg on the issue of quantifying marketing ROI regardless of trillions in model spending. “That’s what acquired us so enthusiastic about what Tomas and these superb, superb, very distinctive staff of engineers that he has pulled collectively.”