Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: A new ad tech company wants to use AI to make advertising analytics quicker and more efficient. A little clichéd? Perhaps. But there’s nothing wrong with a little optimism.
That’s what Newton Research, which announced its $9 million Series A raise on Tuesday, is aiming to do.
The round brings Newton’s total funding to just over $14 million since 2023 and was led by Greycroft and Bessemer Venture Partners, with participation from S4S Ventures, Aperiam Ventures and LiveRamp Ventures.
Newton has history with LiveRamp. The startup’s CEO and co-founder, John Hoctor, spent nearly three years there as an advisor after selling his previous startup, TV analytics company Data Plus Math, to LiveRamp for $150 million in 2019.
Newton now partners with LiveRamp for access to its clean room tech.
Hoctor co-founded Newton in 2023 to address what he calls the “fundamental problem” in advertising workflows, which is that they’re too often “heavily siloed” and “overly reliant on manual execution.”
Going with the flow
Newton has a team of specialized AI agents built on top of OpenAI, Claude and Gemini that function as analysts of sorts, each with a specific area of expertise, to assist with media planning, buying and measurement.
The agents can get pretty specific in terms of what they can do, including designing incrementality tests and updating MMM. Clients engage with them through a combination of chat and graphics, said Matt Emans, Newton’s CTO and co-founder and Hoctor’s co-founder at Data Plus Math.
Agents can determine a company’s best optimization opportunities based on previous media deployment and analyze key KPIs. For instance, an agent can look at all of the various channels where a brand is deploying media, and based on what’s performing best, it can suggest updates to the budget allocation for the rest of the campaign.
Notably, Newton can run within whatever environment the data already lives in, like Snowflake or Databricks, rather than requiring clients to import their data into a new, external platform.
The tool also has different variations for different data storage platforms. For example, said Hoctor, “Newton might leverage a Gemini model with inference on Vertex in GCP while utilizing AWS Bedrock for inference with Claude in AWS.”
The capabilities are similar in each environment but tailored to the platform’s existing data and systems.
Oh, what fun(d)
While most of Newton’s early adopters have been agencies, it’s recently seen increased interest from publishers, brands and ad tech platforms.
Companies up and down the supply chain are struggling to get the “data science analytics talent” they need, said Hoctor, “and they’re all looking for ways to augment human intelligence with tools.”
And that’s why Newton went after more funding, to meet the uptick in demand and operate on a larger scale.
What does Newton plan to do with the funds from this round? The answer is somewhat unorthodox, especially for an AI-powered platform.
Hoctor said the money will mainly go toward hiring to account for the company’s rapid growth and the spike in sales. And not just hiring, he said, but “aggressively hiring” across the entire company, from customer success and engineering to sales and marketing.
Newton entered the ad tech scene at a serendipitous moment, when campaign insights were in high demand and probabilistic modeling – Newton’s framework – was gaining traction.
Due to the slow deprecation of third-party cookies and growing media fragmentation, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to find a truly “deterministic answer” to the question of how to allocate media spend and distribution, Emans said.
But, he added, that problem is “a perfect AI problem” for agencies, publishers and brands to address with probabilistic modeling.
