• by Tyler Loechner  @mp_tyler, June 18, 2015

MentAd, a predictive marketing and analytics firm, on Thursday announced it has closed a $4.7 million round of funding led by Blumberg Capital and OurCrowd. Edisson Investments, Titanium VC and Flint Capital also participated.

MentAd claims its platform is able to predict a marketers’ next customer based on the behavior of existing customers. Prospected customers can then be targeted using MentAd’s platform across Facebook and Google Display Network, per a release.

“Right now marketers’ best practice is what we call ‘spray and pray’ -- they assume who the best target audience for their brand might be and run campaigns to test out their hypothesis,” stated Yuval Baror, co-founder of MentAd. He added that this “experimentation” “takes time [and] wastes millions of dollars in ad spend targeting the wrong people.”

This type of data-driven approach to finding new audiences is not a novel idea, but it has recently been making waves throughout the industry.

AdRoll, a large retargeting firm, added “prospecting” capabilities to its platform earlier this week, and when Salesforce entered the ad tech arena it boasted “lookalike modeling” technology. MentAd is the latest example, as its predictive marketing tech help land it nearly $5 million in funding.