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Prescient AI raises $4.5M to help DTC brands advertise on a privacy-first internet

Nancy Dahlberg
Nancy Dahlberg
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By Nancy Dahlberg

The post-cookie world is here. While use of user-tracking techniques including marketing cookies, pixels and Apple’s IDFA are fading, regulatory changes and technologies such as Private Relay and Google One VPN are accelerating, crippling marketers’ ability to accurately measure the impact of their paid campaigns. The result for brands: higher acquisition costs and wasted ad dollars.

That’s where Miami-based startup Prescient AI comes in. Founded by Mike True and Cody Greco, Prescient AI is developing a marketing simulation and prediction platform with artificial intelligence-powered tools that help eCommerce and direct-to-consumer companies more accurately forecast demand and optimize marketing efforts to target their most valuable customers.

“Prescient lets brands leapfrog over their competitors, who continue to rely on these fading technologies,” said True, Prescient’s CEO. ” Prescient is creating a future-proof approach to attribution, leveraging machine learning to empower marketers or CFOs to make unbiased, clear-eyed decisions about how to use their marketing budgets.”

Today, Prescient announced that it has raised a $4.5 million seed round led by Miami-based Blumberg Capital, the first investor in Braze, DoubleVerify and Yotpo. Participating in the round were CEAS Investments, Darling Ventures, and DTC executive and Miami-based angel investor Troy Osinoff. This round follows its $1.7 million in pre-seed funding in 2021.

True is a former SaaS veteran and IBM executive who managed major accounts like Uber, Google, and Microsoft at mobile analytics company App Annie. Greco, Prescient’s CTO, was previously Director of Data Science for Grubhub. The two met online during the pandemic and the startup was founded in late 2020.

“We spent about 14 months going into a very deep research and development cycle. We built out integrations across all of the different ad platforms – Shopify, Google Analytics, etc. – to allow brands to get on our platform very quickly. We built an artificial intelligence model from the ground up that’s purpose-built to help marketers feel more confident in their advertising decisions in the privacy-first internet,” True said in an interview with Refresh Miami.

 Early on, the Prescient AI platform was notably deployed in a project for one of the world’s biggest record labels. The startup reported that it was able to analyze a prominent female rapper’s new album and predict her number one Billboard-ranked song with 96.3% accuracy.

Prescient launched last quarter, and True says the platform is showing about a 60% conversion rate. “We’re working with a ton of Shopify brands like Aviron and KC Lights, and with the agencies. By partnering with us, they have access to models that will help them spend more intelligently on behalf of their clients. So we’re off to the races now.”

It takes 10 minutes for eCommerce companies to onboard onto Prescient’s  platform. Within 36 hours, their data will be trained, back-tested and live within a dashboard, the fastest onboarding in the attribution space, True said.

A unique offering the Prescient team went to market with is campaign-specific revenue attribution and insights, called halo effects. These insights help users understand how search traffic and direct visits to a brand’s web store are impacted by digital spend across Facebook, TikTok, Pinterest, Snap, Youtube, and Google’s shopping campaigns, like PMAX.

What’s ahead? “We have the ability to measure, optimize and predict the forecasted outcome of their marketing campaigns. So essentially [brands] will have the ability to simulate what a campaign will do before they spend and what their predicted outcome will be,” True said. “That’s going to be released in early Q2.”

Prescient is a team  of 14 now, up from 3 at the time of its 2021 funding. With this new round of fundraising, Prescient will start to scale sales and marketing efforts and their customer success team. They hope to hire for these roles largely from the Miami area. Prescient is one of a number of Miami area startups leveraging AI in their solutions.

Bruce Taragin, Managing Director at Blumberg Capital, has joined the Prescient board.

“The Prescient team has developed a solution that truly stands out among existing solutions that rely on outdated and unfavorable identity and device tracking. We believe Prescient’s unique technology is a long-term, scalable solution for the growing pain point across the digital marketing landscape,” Taragin said.

Pictured at top of this post: Prescient AI co-founders Mike True, CEO, and Cody Greco, CTO.

Follow Nancy Dahlberg on Twitter @ndahlberg and email her at [email protected]

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