Voyantis Ltd., a startup that helps companies increase the effectiveness of their ad campaigns, launched from stealth mode today with $19 million in funding.

The funding was provided by a group of investors that included Target Global, Square Peg and a half-dozen other institutional backers. A number of executives from major tech companies such as Adobe Inc. and Meta Platforms Inc. participated as well.

Tel Aviv-based Voyantis offers a software platform that helps companies optimize their online ads. The platform uses artificial intelligence to analyze a company’s internal business data and glean insights into the buying preferences of its customers. According to Voyantis, the insights gleaned by its AI can be used to inform the development of more effective ad campaigns.

With the help of Voyantis’ platform, a retailer could create ads that more effectively target the customers who spend the most in its e-commerce store. It’s also possible to optimize a promotional campaign in other ways. A company could, for example, optimize its ads to better draw the attention of users who have a high retention rate and frequently make repeat purchases.

“Talking to hundreds of customers we realized that there’s a need to shift from decision making based on spreadsheets and calculations, to decision making based on machine learning and predictions,” said Voyantis co-founder and Chief Executive Officer Ido Wiesenberg. “Another realization is that predictions alone are not enough, the capability to seamlessly act on them is no-less important.”

To help companies act on the insights surfaced by its platform, Voyantis provides integrations with popular advertising and marketing automation tools. The integrations make it easier to incorporate data from the startup’s platform into ad campaigns.

“Predicting who the high-value customers are early on becomes even more critical as the mindset shifts to profitable growth,” said Square Peg partner Yonatan Sela. “These are inputs any company scaling online customer acquisition and retention efforts should leverage, and Voyantis makes them easily accessible across the org.”

According to Voyantis, its platform has helped customers realize an average increase of 47% in return on advertising spend. Furthermore, the startup promises to ease the work of enterprise data science teams. Voyantis’ AI algorithms automate the task of analyzing a company’s business data for opportunities to optimize ads, which is usually a complicated and time-consuming task. 

Startups are also using AI to optimize other aspects of organizations’ marketing operations. Recently funded startup Movable Ink Inc. uses machine learning to automatically customize promotional content for different users. Blue Ocean AI Inc., which raised a $30 million funding round in April, helps companies track brand awareness and other marketing metrics. 

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