Alembic, a startup that offers AI-powered data analytics for marketers, said it has raised $145 million in a fundraising round that values the company at $645 million.
Alembic’s software is designed to help companies tie marketing activity more directly to sales and other business results. By conducting billions of artificial intelligence-driven queries regarding the relationships between data points drawn from television, podcasts and other media platforms, the company says it can connect events like ad buys or social media mentions to individual consumer actions or purchases.
Growth equity firm Prysm Capital and consulting giant Accenture led the new Series B round, which also included WndrCo, an investment firm co-founded by former DreamWorks chief executive Jeffrey Katzenberg, and venture-capital firm SLW.
WndrCo led an early 2024 series A round that valued Alembic at $49 million, Katzenberg said.
Marketers that focus on ads’ immediate performance have for some time been able to demonstrate returns on their digital spending, but the same hasn’t been true for marketers with broader branding goals, according to Katzenberg. Recent advances in AI have changed that by enabling companies to draw new connections between points in big advertisers’ massive data sets, he said.
WndrCo since investing in Alembic has helped introduce the company to marketers that became clients, including Mars and Delta Air Lines, Katzenberg added.
Alembic’s tools have helped confectionary giant Mars determine how unpaid social media mentions of its brands might affect sales, said Gülen Bengi, lead global chief marketing officer for Mars and global chief growth officer for the company’s Mars Snacking division, in a statement.
Accenture had begun using Alembic to help clients restructure their businesses around AI tools before it co-led this funding round, according to a statement from Julie Sweet, the firm’s chair and CEO.
Prysm joined the funding round partly because it believes Alembic’s use of AI helps it stand out among the many businesses offering ad-attribution services, said Matt Roberts, a co-founder and partner at the investment firm. “It is predictive and it can run real-time ‘what if’ analysis at significant scale,” Roberts said.
Alembic will use some of its new funding to buy the Nvidia chips it needs to build a so-called supercomputing cluster in San Jose, Calif., that will complement its initial Virginia-based unit, according to founder and CEO Tomás Puig. Nvidia was the company’s first customer.