Meet Recast, the latest addition to Lerer Hippeau’s portfolio.

HQ: New York

Founders: Michael Kaminsky and Tom Vladeck

The problem: Every year, billions of dollars are wasted on marketing spend that is either misguided or ineffective. These dollars flow from innovators, investors, and entrepreneurs and wind up in the coffers of the world’s largest companies. In the process, consumers are barraged with advertisements for products they’ll never purchase, crowding out the messages for products that might actually be useful. Existing measurement approaches aren’t addressing this waste; they fail to measure incrementality (such as digital tracking and multi-touch attribution); and, they don’t begin to answer the question marketers need to answer: how should we adjust our budget to maximize returns for our business?

Recast’s solution: Recast puts state of the art marketing science tools into the hands of marketing practitioners. Tools for marketing mix modeling (MMM), forecasting and planning, and robust marketing optimization can be used directly by marketing teams without waiting on data scientists or outside consulting firms. To make this possible, Recast uses cutting-edge artificial intelligence and bayesian statistics to automate processes that have typically required hundreds of data-science hours to do by hand. The result: significantly improved speed and enhanced accuracy. Instead of spending large amounts of money over months or years, Recast delivers reliable, forward looking insights in just days or weeks, without having to rely on third-party data.

Origin story: Recast was founded by Michael Kaminsky and Tom Vladeck, two statisticians with deep expertise in marketing measurement. Prior to Recast, Michael led the analytics team at Harry’s, where he developed a nuanced understanding of the challenges omni-channel marketers face every day. During that time, Tom started and led Gradient, a quantitative marketing and research firm that brings together traditional market research and data science to build models for clients like Amazon, McKinsey, and Nike. Together, they saw an opportunity to modernize media mix modeling and develop methods that help companies piece together disconnected and biased data sources into a coherent whole.

Why we’re betting on it: As omni-channel distribution has grown, companies have struggled to develop reliable methods of forecasting and marketing. iOS updates compound the problem, creating continuous challenges for marketers who want to understand the impact of their advertisements. Moreover, the ongoing drought of data scientists has made it difficult for companies to design quality tools, and the agencies who do have the resources fall short on delivering results in a time sensitive manner. While traditional measurement solutions are largely backwards-looking, Recast provides a full suite of planning, forecasting, and optimization tools that allow companies to streamline their strategizing. The key to its value proposition is in its ability to look at a brand’s entire media mix holistically rather than looking at each channel in a silo. By empowering marketing teams with trustworthy insights, Recast is positioning itself as the leader in next generation marketing optimization technologies

Our take: 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. They’ve built a seasoned team of PhD-level statisticians and experts in high performance computing and computational probability to build a truly novel solution, automating tasks and reducing the turnaround on actionable insights. The platform isn’t just “nice to have” — it’s business critical, particularly during a challenging financial environment. Recast is already delivering tangible results, and is used by some of the world’s best marketers at companies like Harry’s, Away, and MasterClass. They use the Recast platform to collaborate with their finance and leadership teams to produce realistic budgets and forecasts based on the most up-to-date performance results, rather than optimistic excel spreadsheets. Tom and Michael have done a lot with a little, and have built a company with remarkable customer loyalty, best-in-class revenue retention, and effectively zero churn. We couldn’t be more excited to partner with them as they continue to scale what we believe is the best automated marketing science platform in the world.

Further reading: “Here’s the pitch deck that Recast, which aims to help brands like Harry’s and Away increase their return on marketing spend, used to raise seed funds at a $25 million valuation” via Business Insider

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