BlueOcean raises $15M to measure brand sentiment with AI

BlueOcean, a computer software-as-a-service platform that taps AI to provide brand method insights, today announced that it closed a $15 million series A round led by Insight Partners. The corporation says that the funds will be used to develop its  group, deepen current investments in AI, and make on BlueOcean’s current client base.

Brand drives income. The strength of a company’s brand straight impacts its capacity to sell to a client, obtain talent, and drive shareholder worth. According to McKinsey, powerful brands regularly outperform the marketplace. The world’s 40 strongest brands “yielded almost twice the total return to shareholders of an investment in a Morgan Stanley Capital International (MSCI) World index certificate over the course of the 20-year period ending in 2019.”

Historically, firms have relied on opinion surveys and consultants to measure brand sentiment. In contrast, BlueOcean, which was cofounded by Grant McDougall, Liza Nebel, Matthew Gross, and Mike Semick, employs AI to mine, analyze, and triangulate thousands of information sources in order to provide genuine-time information and insights.

“BlueOcean is transforming the way marketing decisions are made by helping brands track their total brand health in near real time, using publicly available data to do two things: understand what areas of their brand need attention [and] determine what actions should be taken to drive growth,” McDougall, who serves as CEO, told VentureBeat through e mail. “[We realized that] much of the data mining and analysis needed for brand strategizing could be automated, and at the same time, it could offer actionable advice that marketing teams and C-suite executives could deploy quickly.”

Tracking brand sentiment

Underscoring the significance of optics, one survey showed that 81% of customers necessary to be in a position to trust a brand in order to purchase from them. And consumers make up their minds speedily — it requires about 50 milliseconds (.05 seconds) on typical for them to kind an opinion about a site.

BlueOcean, which sees itself in competitors with consultancies like Interbrand, McKinsey, Boston Consulting Group, and Accenture, leverages significant information and AI models that have been educated for more than 16,000 hours on information from more than 1,110 consumers and brand method pros. According to McDougall, BlueOcean had to construct its personal education datasets so that its algorithm could recognize the features most salient to brand marketers.

“BlueOcean’s platform is replicating subjective, human evaluations such as an ad’s simplicity or complexity, or its directness or subtlety,” McDougall explained. “Our algorithms had to be trained to evaluate images, text content, and hundreds of numerical data points to be able to reproduce these types of fuzzy evaluations.  Only by first understanding what factors are going to be most relevant and actionable to brand marketers can our product deliver outputs that make a difference to them.”

BlueOcean is not sharing its income numbers, but the startup claims to have grown higher than 3 occasions “continuously” because its founding in 2019. As for its client base, it spans about 60 brands, such as teams at Microsoft, Google, Bloomingdale’s, Panda Express, Cisco, Riot Games, and Juniper Networks.

“By using real-time AI-sentiment algorithms that analyze hundreds of data sources, BlueOcean … delivers an unprecedented level of intelligence so that brands can immediately see new growth areas, track momentum, category shifts, and predict a competitor’s next move,” McDougall stated. “BlueOcean provides the means for investors to understand competitive brands in the category that have a large footprint but declining customer satisfaction and select acquisition targets to offset operational challenges and form the basis for investment decisions, allowing faster identification and quantification of portfolio company choices.”

To date, San Francisco, California-based Blue Ocean has raised $20 million, a mixture of the series A and a $5 million seed round.

Originally appeared on: TheSpuzz