Voyantis, a startup developing tools to estimate a customer’s lifetime value, today emerged from stealth with $19 million in seed funding from Target Global, Square Peg, Schusterman Family Investments, Kaedan Capital and Operator Partners. CEO Ido Wiesenberg tells TechCrunch that the funds will be used to expand Voyantis’ product offering and support more use cases in the future.
Wiesenberg and Eran Friendinger founded Voyantis in 2020, motivated by the idea that many companies today base growth and marketing decisions on spreadsheets — or so Weisenberg claims. “Traditional methods were making it difficult to both analyze and utilize company-owned data to make informed time-sensitive decisions and activate growth,” he told TechCrunch in an email. “These days, as all companies are making the shift to get on the path to profitability, it is crucial to understand and act on the future value of each user.”
Wiesenberg previously co-launched over-the-top tech provider Tvinci and Frido Communication, a digital marketing boutique. Friendinger was one of the founding members of Adience, a platform for publishers that used AI to profile smartphone users.
Wiesenberg doesn’t posit that Voyantis can predict the future. But he says that the platform, by applying machine learning algorithms to thousands of data points, can project a user’s future propensity and lifetime value shortly after acquisition and throughout their journey. When applied to ad campaigns, he says, these predictions can be used by marketing teams to make campaign decisions, or fed as signals into ad networks and marketing automation platforms such as Google, Facebook, Klaviyo, Braze and Hubspot.
“We build a continuous ‘flurry of models’ to predict the lifetime value at different levels of maturity in the customer’s lifetime for a myriad business use cases,” Wiesenberg explained. “That allows a continuous business utility of the predictive power of modeling. We [also] build an AI ‘orchestration algorithm’ that decides when to activate a prediction. This is all while taking into account the business reward, or cost of predicting early enough versus the increased confidence you get the longer you wait. This meta-algorithm is what creates the secret sauce, connecting the business impact with the ‘dry’ machine-learning mathematical formulation.”
To protect customers’ privacy, Voyantis only stores anonymous usage data, according to Wiesenberg.
“[Using Voyantis,] C-level executives can set predictable long-term goals and measure them within the quarter,” Wiesenberg said. “The VP and director levels can set their individual team’s goal as a derivative. [And the] operational teams can activate machine learning-fueled workflows that optimize to those same KPIs.”
Can AI accurately predict a customer’s lifetime value? Plenty of startups besides Voyantis suggest that it can, including DataScience and Ocurate. One Voyantis rival, Black Crow AI, advertises a product that can ostensibly figure out which products e-commerce customers are most likely to buy.
While there’s reason to be skeptical, Wiesenberg points to Voyantis’ expansion as evidence that there’s credence to his claims. The over-50-employee company is generating “seven figures” in annual revenue (Wiesenberg declined to get more specific than that) and counts brands like Notion among its customers.
“Amid the current downturn, the current trend is a shift in mindset — going back to basics. This is seen in the way growth leaders are making sure their unit economics work and that their companies have a path to profitability set in place,” Wiesenberg said. “This creates an amazing opportunity for Voyantis, as our mission is to help customers focus on the right users, therefore increasing their efficiency — improving unit economics. Given the general trend, it is no surprise this has been by far our best quarter to date.”
