LiftLab

LiftLab offers a specialized software platform, the LiftLab Trust Engine™, designed to optimize marketing spend and accurately predict revenue outcomes. This platform integrates agile marketing mix modeling, media experimentation, and artificial intelligence to provide comprehensive, unbiased insights into media effectiveness, quantifying both short-term performance and crucial long-term brand impacts. It empowers marketers with a robust, data-driven framework to understand the true incrementality of their diverse media investments across the entire customer funnel.

Co-founded by John Wallace and Bala Kandula around 2018, LiftLab was established on the insight that existing marketing measurement methods struggled to keep pace with the rapidly evolving digital advertising landscape and complex consumer behaviors. Wallace and Kandula recognized the need for a unified econometric framework that could blend the speed and precision of experiments with the holistic view of mix modeling, thereby providing marketers with more actionable and accurate guidance for their investment strategies.

The platform caters to marketing teams seeking to maximize the profitability and revenue generated from their media budgets, serving a range of clients from ambitious growth-stage companies to established market leaders. LiftLab's vision is to be the definitive "trust engine" for full-funnel media investment decisions, enabling marketers to allocate their budgets with unparalleled clarity, strategic precision, and confidence to achieve optimal, measurable returns.

High-Level Overview

LiftLab is a marketing technology company that provides a platform for full-funnel media planning, leveraging data science, AI, and econometric models to maximize revenue and profitability from media spend.[1][3] Its core product, the LiftLab Trust Engine™, combines marketing mix modeling (MMM), experiments, and AI agents to deliver accurate, unbiased insights into short-term performance, long-term brand effects, and optimized spend allocation, serving marketers who need to demonstrate ROI and guide business growth.[1][3] With $2M raised in a 2019 Seed VC round from Cowboy Ventures, the company has grown to approximately 169 employees and $57.5M in revenue, headquartered in Oakland, California.[2][4]

Origin Story

LiftLab emerged from the need for precise marketing measurement, raising its initial $2M Seed VC funding on March 13, 2019, backed by Cowboy Ventures.[2] The leadership team, including key figures like Ramaraju Samanthapudi, Nichola Hillis, and Sami Rabb, brings decades of experience in measurement, data science, and attribution from major organizations, supported by marketing science advisors from academia and industry.[3] Since 2020, LiftLab has evolved its LiftLab Trust Engine™ as a unified framework merging MMM, experiments, and AI, addressing gaps in traditional models amid rapid shifts in ad platforms.[1]

Core Differentiators

• LiftLab Trust Engine™: Merges MMM, experiments, and AI via a unified econometric framework for unmatched accuracy, quantifying short-term and long-term impacts while resolving data conflicts from attribution, surveys, and media sources.[1]
• Real-Time Agility: Agile mix models capture fast changes in CPM, CPC, and creative performance, enabling smarter spend decisions unlike static models.[1]
• AI-Powered Optimization: Natural language queries deliver analyst-level insights with incrementality-backed precision; what-if scenarios forecast revenue from spend reallocation across channels.[1]
• Comprehensive Measurement: "Octagonal" optimization enriches weak signals, links diminishing returns experiments, and balances performance with brand growth for intuitive, marketer-friendly tools.[1][3]

Role in the Broader Tech Landscape

LiftLab rides the wave of AI-driven marketing analytics, where ad platforms evolve rapidly and marketers demand transparent ROI amid privacy changes and signal loss.[1] Its timing aligns with the rise of incrementality testing and hybrid models post-2020, filling gaps in legacy attribution tools by unifying data sources for full-funnel clarity.[1][3] Market forces like increasing media complexity and the need for data-savvy leaders favor LiftLab, influencing the ecosystem by empowering brands to optimize budgets efficiently and setting standards for AI-trusted measurement.[1][4]

Quick Take & Future Outlook

LiftLab is poised to expand its AI agents and real-time capabilities as marketing shifts toward predictive, multi-channel orchestration amid evolving regulations and platform algorithms.[1] Trends like generative AI for creative testing and zero-party data integration will shape its growth, potentially scaling revenue beyond $57.5M through enterprise adoption.[4] Its influence may evolve by becoming the go-to engine for media ROI, solidifying marketers as strategic drivers in business growth.[3]