Prophet raises $5m in seed round backed by Heavyweights

Big media names pour cash into ‘cookie-free’ ad start-up

First Published in Australian Financial Review - Mar 18, 2024 – 8.00am

Link to original publication here.

Big-name Australian media and advertising executives Antony Catalano and Matt Rockman are among investors in a new advertising technology start-up, which promises to let companies accurately target consumers, without relying on invasive tracking cookies.Prophet was formed in 2020 by digital marketing specialists Jordan Taylor-Bartels and Sean Taylor, and has been in trials with early clients pending an imminent release.

Prophet’s chief commercial officer Paul Veltman, co-founder and CEO Jordan Taylor-Bartels and Sean Taylor, its co-founder and executive chairman. 

It has raised a $5 million seed funding round at an undisclosed valuation, but Mr Taylor-Bartels told The Australian Financial Review it had not cost much equity. It will be used to target medium to large companies, as they adjust their digital advertising plans to account for Google’s imminent ban of third-party cookies.The funding round included no venture capital firms, but alongside Australian Community Media boss Mr Catalano, and Seek co-founder Mr Rockman, it was backed by unnamed sporting identities and former Dentsu chief executive Cheuk Chiang. Mr Taylor-Bartels said Prophet’s product combined advanced mathematics with predictive intelligence to help organisations quantify the historical return on investment of their online and offline marketing, while also predicting future outcomes. It did this by tracking thousands of macroeconomic data points, which meant organisations could react to changes in the market in real time.

The entrepreneurs see a big commercial opportunity to offer new ways of evaluating digital advertising as a landmark shift approaches, whereby Google is blocking the use of so-called third-party cookies, which companies install on websites to follow users around the internet and build up a picture on their interests.

New advertising era

They will be phased out on Chrome by the end of 2024, putting Google alongside Apple in the privacy stakes, and leaving brands looking for new ways to ensure their advertising dollars are well-directed.

“These cookies essentially dictated the times for the best part of a decade, as they could provide attribution or measurement back from one channel to another, and organisations came to rely on them to decide whether to invest in a certain channel or another,” Mr Taylor-Bartels said.“Prophet removes the reliance on cookies or user-centric tracking, using mathematics and statistics, to cover the gaps the cookies once left, and also providing new opportunities for measurability.

”The company is pre-revenue and only employs 10 people, but Mr Taylor-Bartels said that would change quickly after the capital raise. Most of its staff are mathematicians or data scientists, and the CEO singled out chief science officer Patrick Robotham, and chief data officer John Strumila as key early employees.“Patrick is an expert in neural networks and has built neural networks and data science programs and programming languages for the likes of Linktree,” Mr Taylor-Bartels said.“John, meanwhile, has degrees in advanced mathematics and statistics, and once built mainframes for the likes of IBM. He has 40 to 50 years’ experience and allows us to have a perspective on old-world mathematics, which is often under-utilised.”

Mr Catalano told The Australian Financial Review his decision to invest was made because he saw how useful Prophet’s technology would be to his companies Australian Community Media and View Media. He will be both an investor and customer of Prophet.He said he was particularly impressed by the platform’s ability to simulate what would happen if different decisions were made, regarding pricing and other variables.“It helps us close the gap on some of our offerings to consumers, so beyond being an investor, I’ve got a suite of assets that require optimisation of advertising dollars,” he said.“ACM has 40,000 customers, and View Media Group has 8200 registered real estate agents on the site, and Prophet is a tool that we think will help the efficacy of our products.

“As an investment it is addressing a trillion-dollar market, so the sky is the limit in terms of opportunity.”