Seek co-founder Matt Rockman and prominent Australian media and advertising mogul Antony Catalano of Australian Community Media have invested $5 million in seed money in the marketing technology business Prophet.

Prophet, a digital marketing firm founded in 2020 by Jordan Taylor-Bartels and Sean Taylor, claims to be dedicated to facilitating accurate customer targeting without the traditional dependence on intrusive tracking cookies.

Prophet’s development has mainly gone unnoticed, as the Australian Financial Review (AFR) originally revealed. The company’s founders thoroughly tested the technology with a small number of early clients before making it public.

The platform has drawn interest due to its timely relevance as well as its distinct method of addressing the changing landscape of digital advertising. Prophet’s technology, which employs sophisticated mathematics and predictive intelligence, offers a forward-looking solution for medium- to large-sized businesses reevaluating their digital advertising strategy in light of Google’s impending ban on third-party cookies, which has been in the works since early 2020.

“We’ve packaged the world’s most sophisticated mathematics and data analysis into a living, breathing platform that any brand decision-maker can use to optimise every brand dollar, without having to be tech-savvy,” Taylor-Bartels said.

“Our testing to date has demonstrated Prophet can save businesses anywhere from 10 to 50% on marketing and ad spend by accurately demonstrating what’s working, and where budgets should be diverted for maximum impact. There’s clearly an appetite for this breakthrough, too; raising $5 million for a new platform in this market is hard at the best of times, and we’ve managed to achieve that pre-revenue.”

With the support of hundreds of macroeconomic data points, the startup’s software helps businesses evaluate and forecast the return on investment (ROI) of their marketing initiatives. This allows for a quick reaction to changes in the market without depending on the controversial cookie-based monitoring techniques.

“Consumer sentiment and spending power is low, inflation is high, and Google’s 2024 sunsetting of third-party cookies has made it much harder to measure return on investment,” Taylor-Bartels said.

“Meanwhile, marketers are using market-mix-modeling tech based on the same mathematical models used to predict the weather. Prophet gives them the ability to unearth subtle trends that previously would have been missed.”

The fundraising round includes contributions from Cheuk Chiang, the former CEO of Dentsu, but VC firms are conspicuously absent. Taylor-Bartels attested to the AFR that no substantial equity was given up in order to obtain the cash infusion.

Taylor-Bartels says that the additional funding will enable the Prophet team to expand beyond its ten present members, the majority of whom are mathematicians and data scientists.