Alembic, a startup that applies pandemic-era contact tracing mathematics to marketing attribution, today announced a $14 million Series A funding round led by entertainment mogul Jeffrey Katzenberg’s firm WndrCo. 

The round comes amid growing demand from Fortune 500 chief marketing officers for AI-powered tools to measure return on investment from massive marketing budgets increasingly spread across digital channels.

“We continually ask Fortune 500 CMOs about their top challenges. The most common response is around proving the effectiveness of marketing spend,” WndrCo partner Justin Wexler told VentureBeat in an exclusive interview. He added, “It’s really in the DNA of WndrCo to connect innovative technology with some of the most forward-leaning CMOs.”

Predicting the future of sales

Alembic’s software traces marketing campaigns to sales outcomes, attributing revenue and predicting future ROI across TV, radio, podcasts, social media and other unstructured data sources. The startup applies techniques originally developed during COVID-19 to trace causes and patterns in disparate public health datasets.

“You can think about it as a giant point where every human is somebody you could connect the dots with,” said Alembic founder and CEO Tomas Puig. “What we do is predict where the connections will occur [using] huge amounts of data.” 

Alembic’s software looks at all your marketing channels — website, social media, TV, radio etc. It also looks at your sales data. Then it quickly finds patterns between your marketing activities and sales results. This helps you understand what marketing is working to drive sales. (Image Credit: Alembic)

This “contact tracing” of data points happen in real time, a major advantage over marketing mix models that can take months to produce results. 

“People call me the nerdiest CMO they ever met. These problems are just as hard as any of the giant data problems anyone else is tackling, maybe even more so because it’s at the intersection of both art and science,” Puig told VentureBeat.

The quest for measurable ROI

Early customers deploying Alembic include graphics chipmaker Nvidia, water sports brand North Sails, and Texas A&M athletics. The funding will help Alembic acquire more engineering talent and broaden its product lineup.

“There’s trillions and trillions of dollars spent every year in brand marketing,” Katzenberg told VentureBeat. “And for the most part, there’s actually no hard data that is proof of ROI.”

“Deploying AI allows companies to increase productivity in ways not possible before,” Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of NVIDIA, told VentureBeat in a statement. “Alembic is using AI developed for scientific research applications to predict ROI from marketing. NVIDIA marketing is using Alembic with great success.”

Alembic’s approach aligns with growing CMO frustration over the inability to measure marketing effectiveness and connect spend to sales outcomes concretely. Katzenberg, who has evaluated multiple attribution solutions unsuccessfully in the past, believes Alembic’s technology holds world-changing potential. 

“Somewhere between the meaning of life, the Holy Grail, and the Fountain of Youth is ‘I spent a dollar, but does it actually produce anything?,'” said Katzenberg on the difficulty of quantifying marketing ROI despite trillions in brand spending. “That’s what got us so excited about what Tomas and these amazing, amazing, very unique team of engineers that he has pulled together.”