Brew, which develops AI-powered marketing analytics software, raises $12M Posted on : Mar 22 - 2022

Companies developing artificial intelligence (AI)-powered marketing tools typically claim that their solutions drive strategic decision-making better than software without an algorithmic component. But — as is often the case — the reality is more complicated. AI learns to make predictions from large amounts of high-quality data, and so can be hamstrung (e.g., make mistakes) if that data is not available. The complex nature of marketing stacks, which sprawl across disparate, disconnected systems, can put up logistical roadblocks to implementation.

Brew, a Tel Aviv, Israel-based strategic marketing platform, claims its approach is different from the rest in that it’s more holistic. The company says that it uses AI to automatically map marketing activities, providing “customer-specific” strategic views of a market and a given company’s position in it.

In a show of investor enthusiasm, Brew recently raised $12 million in an oversubscribed seed round led by Aleph and MizMaa with participation from Gefen Capital. With the investment, which was announced today. Brew says that the new capital allows the company to expand the platform across the North American, European, and Middle East and North Africa markets while growing Brew’s R&D and go-to-market teams.

Automating marketing activities

Maayan Levy, the CEO of Brew, founded the company in 2019 with Raviv Ventura, Ronen Idrisov and Gabriel Amram. Ventura previously cofounded Zoliro, a startup that allowed event organizers to create digital “conference bags” filled with promotions from sponsors. Amram served over six years in the Israel Defense Forces before becoming the vice president of R&D at Zoliro. As for Idrisov, he led product development and data efforts at online advertising tech companies Sizmek and Innovid.

“More companies are adopting an agile, digitally led mindset, but transformation needs to be sustainable as companies try to keep up with business, market, and customer needs in an ever- (and faster-) changing market landscape,” Levy told VentureBeat via email. “[T]he focus has [historically] been around building and optimizing the siloed effort, [but] this has now been commoditized. The market makers and category leaders will be those who make all these different aspects, from analytical to creative efforts, work in sync and complete alignment to meet the changing business priorities and create lasting commercial impact.”

The idea behind Brew is to help brands gauge the big picture of their go-to-market progress while identifying gaps and opportunities in ongoing efforts, according to Levy. He says that marketers are increasingly shifting away from focusing on “data-driven” approaches to more targeted, long-term forms of outreach. Pointing to a recent survey from Deloitte, Duke University, and the American Marketing Association, Levy asserts that most marketers feel pressure to prove impact quantitatively in the short term but qualitatively with regard to long-term strategic impact.

Levy claims that the algorithms powering Brew were trained on data from “billions” of marketing initiatives from “millions” of sources, enabling users to explore different markets, audiences, topics, and verticals to see which marketing approaches worked best in specific circumstances.  View more