Upwave

There is a peculiar asymmetry at the heart of modern advertising. If you run an ad that asks someone to click a button, buy a thing, or download an app, you can measure the result with almost embarrassing precision - down to the individual click, at the individual second. But if you run an ad meant to make someone feel warmly about your brand - to remember it, to consider it, to eventually, someday, prefer it - you mostly just cross your fingers. This is the top of the funnel, and for a long time it was where measurement went to be vague.

Upwave, a San Francisco company founded in 2012, built a business out of that vagueness. Its tagline - "Bring Science to Top-of-Funnel" - is less a slogan than a thesis statement. The idea is that brand advertising, the multibillion-dollar category that gets you to hum a jingle or recognize a logo, should be as measurable and as accountable as the performance advertising that lives and dies by the click.

The company was founded by Chris Kelly, a former McKinsey consultant and Matrix Partners analyst who, in a nicely recursive origin story, started Upwave because he found it too hard to buy good marketing analytics. Rather than keep shopping, he built the store. Upwave went through Y Combinator's Summer 2012 batch under its original name, Survata, and spent the better part of a decade turning a survey business into a brand-measurement platform.

What Upwave actually does is measure Brand Lift - the incremental change in how people think about a brand as a result of seeing its advertising. It tracks the upper-funnel metrics marketers care about (awareness, recall, consideration) and the lower-funnel ones (purchase intent, and its own proprietary metric, Purchase Propensity). It offers two flavors of measurement, Observed and Predictive, so that campaigns too small for a classic survey approach can still get a read.

The output is a real-time dashboard - a nightly, cross-media scorecard that stitches together Connected TV, digital, social, streaming audio, retail media, linear and addressable television into a single view. For a brand spending across a dozen fragmented channels, that consolidation is the whole point. The media landscape keeps splintering; Upwave's bet is that the splintering is the opportunity.

The client list is the kind that makes a B2B sales team happy: Unilever, Clorox, Verizon, American Express, T-Mobile, Corona, State Farm, Uber. In aggregate, Upwave says it has measured over one trillion ad impressions for more than a thousand advertisers - a number large enough to be slightly abstract, which is fitting for a company whose job is making abstraction measurable.

In 2020, Survata became Upwave. Rebrands are usually forgettable, but this one carried a signal: the company had outgrown the survey-vendor label. It wasn't just asking people questions anymore; it was measuring brand outcomes. Alongside the new name came a Google integration, and the repositioning stuck. (The old Survata handles still linger on Twitter and Facebook, a small archaeological trace of the previous identity.)

The funding history is modest by the standards of adtech unicorns but steady: a $1.5 million seed in 2013 from PivotNorth Capital and Uncork Capital; a $6 million Series A in 2015 led by Ridge Ventures, with Bloomberg Beta and Initialized Capital - the latter bringing Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian and Garry Tan onto the cap table; and a $14 million Series B in 2018 led by Conductive Ventures, a firm backed by Panasonic. That is roughly $21.8 million total, which for a measurement company is less a war chest than a set of well-timed nudges.

More recently, Upwave has leaned into two things the industry keeps talking about: Connected TV and AI. It expanded a partnership with the CTV ad platform MNTN so that advertisers can measure and optimize brand lift directly inside their campaigns, and it introduced a Customer Forecast Metric that tries to predict the long-term customer lift a brand campaign will eventually produce. It also picked up a Generative AI Innovation Award, a sign that the measurement layer is absorbing the same AI tooling as everything else in software.

None of this is flashy. Upwave is not a consumer app or a household name; it is infrastructure. But it occupies a genuinely useful position - sitting quietly between the brands that spend the money and the media that carries the ads, keeping score. In an industry full of people insisting their advertising works, being the company that can actually check is a reasonable place to stand.