Recast, an artificial intelligence platform that helps marketers measure and optimize their marketing spend, announced the close of an additional $3.4 million seed funding round led by Lerer Hippeau as a follow up to a previously-undisclosed $1.1 million pre-seed round led by Good Friends in 2021. This round, led by many of the brightest lights in consumer goods, ecommerce, and marketing, solidifies Recast’s position as the leader in the next generation of marketing optimization technologies.
Good Friends, led by the founders of Warby Parker, Allbirds, and Harry’s, has deep expertise in building consumer brands, and Lerer Hippeau is the most active and experienced seed-stage investor in New York, with deep expertise in ecommerce, marketing, and media. Also participating in the round were Data Tech Fund, Vibe Capital, and industry experts Jonah Goodhart (co-founder of brand advertising platform Moat) and Adam Grenier (ex-Uber, ex-Masterclass).
Recast puts state-of-the-art marketing science tools into the hands of practitioners. Tools for marketing mix modeling (MMM), forecasting and planning, and robust marketing optimization can be used directly by marketing teams without having to wait on data scientists or outside consulting firms. Recast uses cutting-edge artificial intelligence and bayesian statistics to automate processes that used to take hundreds of data-science hours to do by hand. And it’s not just theoretical. Recast is already being used by some of the world’s best marketers at companies like Harry’s, Away, and Curology.
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Changes to how users can be tracked across the web and across devices has fundamentally changed how brands need to approach measurement. Eric Osman, CEO and co-founder of Mockingbird, a challenger brand selling strollers across the web and at Target, says “Recast has become an indispensable tool for us in managing our marketing program. Particularly as cookies continue to become a less trustworthy form of tracking, we love that Recast’s platform doesn’t rely on third-party data. Their model provides value on day one, and then just gets even better as we continue using it.”
The key to Recast’s value proposition is the ability to look at a brand’s entire media mix holistically rather than looking at each channel in a silo. “I think all marketers have a tendency to view channel level performance in a vacuum. Recast has been a great tool to teach our team how marketing works holistically. The more we can get people to not chase last-click or view-through attribution data and actually think about incrementality, the better our company is going to be.” says Ty Conner, Director of Growth Marketing (Offline) at RocketMoney.
While many traditional measurement solutions are only backwards-looking, Recast includes a full suite of planning, forecasting, and optimization tools. “Recast has been a valuable source-of-truth for holistic marketing measurement at Harry’s, providing actionable real-time insights to our marketing teams” says Jeff Raider, co-founder and CEO of Harry’s. Marketers use the Recast platform to collaborate with the finance and leadership teams to produce realistic budgets and forecasts based on the most up-to-date performance results rather than optimistic excel spreadsheets.
Recast is founded by Michael Kaminsky and Tom Vladeck, both statisticians with deep expertise in marketing measurement. “Tom and Michael both have incredibly impressive technical expertise combined with a deep knowledge of marketing and the problems modern marketers face when measuring performance,” said Caitlin Strandberg, Partner at Lerer Hippeau. “They’ve built a seasoned team of PhD-level statisticians and experts in high performance computing and computational probability to build a truly cutting-edge platform, automating tasks that used to take trained data scientists hundreds of hours.”
Recast plans to use the investment to scale the software engineering and data science teams to increase their lead as the best automated marketing science platform in the world.
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