FuentesToday, a startup developing tools for estimating a customer’s lifetime value, 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 told TechCrunch that the money will be used to expand Voyantis’ product offerings and support more use cases in the future.
Wiesenberg and Eran Friendsinger 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 have been making it difficult to analyze and use company-owned data to make informed, time-sensitive decisions and stimulate growth,” he told TechCrunch in an email. “These days, as all businesses transition down the path to profitability, it is critical to understand and act on the future value of each user.”
Wiesenberg previously co-founded Tvinci and Frido Communication, a digital marketing company, a leading technology service provider. Friendsinger was a founding member of Adience, a publisher platform that uses artificial intelligence to profile smartphone users.
Wiesenberg does not assume that Voyantis can predict the future. But he says the platform, by applying machine learning algorithms to thousands of data points, can show a user’s future inclinations and life value soon after acquisition and throughout their journey. He says that when applied to ad campaigns, marketing teams can use these predictions to make campaign decisions, or feed them as signals into ad networks and marketing automation platforms such as Google, Facebook, Klaviyo, Braze and Hubspot.
Wiesenberg explained, “We build a continuous series of models ‘to predict lifetime value at various levels of maturity in a customer’s lifetime for a myriad of commercial use cases. we [also] Building an AI “coordination algorithm” that decides when to activate a prediction. All this considering the reward of working, or the cost of predicting early enough versus the increased confidence you get the longer you wait. It is this descriptive algorithm that creates the secret sauce, linking business impact to the “dry” mathematical formulation of machine learning.”
To protect customers’ privacy, Voyantis stores only anonymous usage data, according to Wiesenberg.
“[Using Voyantis,] C-level executives can set long-term, predictable and measurable goals over the quarter,” Wiesenberg said. [And the] Operational teams can animate workflows powered by machine learning that improve these KPIs.”
Can AI accurately predict the lifetime value of a customer? Plenty of startups alongside Voyantis are suggesting this is possible, including DataScience and Ocurate. One of Voyantis’ competitors, Black Crow AI, advertises a product that can ostensibly tell which products e-commerce customers are most likely to buy.
While there is reason to be skeptical, Wiesenberg points to Voyantis’ expansion as evidence of credibility for his claims. A company with more than 50 employees makes “seven figures” in annual revenue (Wiesenberg declined to be more specific than that) and counts brands like Notion among its customers.
“Amid the current downturn, the current trend is a shift in mindset – back to basics. This is seen in the way growth leaders make sure their unit economies are working and their companies have a path to profitability,” Wiesenberg said. “This creates a great opportunity for Voyantis, as our mission is to help customers focus on the right users, thereby increasing their efficiency – improving unit economies. Given the overall trend, it is not surprising that this quarter was our best yet.”
