Rembrand Goes Upscale with Outside Investments to Drive New Ad Model

Generative AI Product Placement Platform takes early investment from BOLD, L’Oréal’s venture capital fund, and Good Friends, which includes founders of Warby Parker, Harry’s and AllBirds

Rembrand, the product placement platform powered by Generative AI, announced today it has taken outside investment from BOLD, L’Oréal’s venture capital fund, and Good Friends, a venture firm started by the founders of AllBirds, Warby Parker and Harry’s, to help scale out its solution and close its initial seed round with participation from major brands. Rembrand is pioneering a foundational model for what it refers to as Generative AI Fusion, which enables brands and other items to be inserted into video content with hyper-realistic product placement and be part of the story, rather than an interruption.

Rembrand launched in February and has already begun engaging with a number of leading brands and content creators of all sizes, ranging from individual YouTube creators all the way up to larger networks and studios who are looking to find ways to reach an increasingly difficult to reach audience.

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Video is still growing dramatically as a primary channel for advertisers online, and brands want to make sure they have a solid way to command consumer attention…

This marks the first time that the team behind Rembrand, who have been successful entrepreneurs in previous companies, have taken brands as investors. CEO Omar Tawakol was also previously CEO of data exchange and platform BlueKai, which scaled the category of data separated from media buying in online advertising, which eventually became the Oracle Data Cloud. Tawakol also led a team to blaze a new path with AI-voice assistants through the launch of Voicea, which was eventually acquired by Cisco and woven into the Webex assistant. Both companies were launched with more traditional institutional investment sources like VC’s and strategic technology investors. This time around, Tawakol brought in investors from brands and talent agencies like United Talent Agency (UTA), who is also an investor.

“Video is still growing dramatically as a primary channel for advertisers online, and brands want to make sure they have a solid way to command consumer attention,” said Tawakol. “We felt it would be important to align with some leading brands who want to help craft the way organic video can be used, and who already understand the value inherent in the creator economy.

Rembrand launched the initial pilot in February with dozens of creators and brands with a growing waitlist of creators across sports and entertainment companies to test their post-production, AI-infused product placement model.

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