Why we invested in Billy Grace

Marketers struggle to measure the true impact of ads and campaigns

Marketing spend typically accounts for a large percentage of brands’ budgets – resp. 10-20% in retail, and yet, many companies have limited insight into which marketing spend is actually driving profitable growth and profitability.

Many marketers are running campaigns concurrently across platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok, Google and YouTube, but struggle to determine which marketing spend is truly driving business results.

The lack of visibility on performance follows from the implementation of new data privacy policies and regulations (e.g. ban on third party cookies, stricter iOS privacy settings and GDRP), which prevents online tracking of customers. Hence, attribution data has become unreliable and it requires tedious manual trial-and-error optimization efforts to shift marketing budgets across platforms to achieve business objectives.

Billy Grace helps to understand ROI across marketing channels

Billy Grace has developed a SaaS proposition with embedded (self learning) AI modules for tracking, attribution modelling, business intelligence and automation, which helps customers understand the ROI of their marketing, deliver actionable insights to drive profitable growth and automate repetitive tasks such as budget allocation.

Brands are using Billy Grace get a clear picture of their customers’ buying behaviour across all online channels paid and organic. They enable customers to invest in marketing efforts that make economic sense, which is especially important today given the current macroeconomic picture.

The AI powered operating system for marketers

Billy Grace is building an operating system for marketers that uses AI to provide them with relevant insights and automate repetitive tasks. The software ultimately caters for all relevant use cases in the day-to-day of a marketeer e.g. performance measurement, ad creatives – resp. AI for object recognition in images to determine the most effectives images and the image elements that drive performance, reporting, budget allocation and many more.

Delivering meaningful (economic) impact for customers

Billy Grace is fit for purpose for b2c and b2b brands. All Billy Grace customers we spoke with are consistently enthusiastic about their offering delivering tangible results in the form of improved customer acquisition cost ratios, reduced cash burn or increased revenues in some cases even at reduced spend.

We found that customers are choosing Billy Grace over competitors because of the accuracy of their performance measures, the automation functionalities embedded in the platform (e.g. automated marketing budget allocation) and its user-friendliness.

Billy Grace also experiences strong traction with digital marketing agencies who value Billy Grace as a means to improve their service levels and work more efficiently enabling them to focus more on the creative and strategic part of their job, which is where they can truly make the difference for their clients.

Complementary Founders with superpowers through their Angel community

The three Founders, Mitch Voskuilen, Robin Friend and Tjadi Peeters are bringing together the right mix of marketing experience and AI (data science) capabilities required to help marketers make sense of ever-expanding amounts and sources of data. They founded and ran a digital agency where they tried solving the exact same problems that they are now tackling in a highly scalable way combining SaaS and IA. This seed round is joined by over 15 successful (former) Founders and Operators as Angels, who’s experience and network will help the team to execute at with laser focus and at light speed.

Billy Grace – What’s in the Name?

The name Billy Grace is reflective of the mission the team aims to accomplish. It is a reference to two of the most popular names in the US at the time the first computer was created. Billy Grace aims to provide the household name and most widely used tool among marketers.

Article by Wouter Goossens, Investment Director at Fortino Capital