Barometer, a marketing data and analytics platform specialized for digital audio advertising, raised USD 2.25 million in a seed funding round co-led by Knoll Ventures, BDMI, and HearstLab, with participation from existing investors Outlander Labs, Altari Ventures, and Brickyard. This brings its total funding to USD 4.2 million.  

The company plans to use the funds to expand its direct sales and engineering teams and develop more partnerships with ad agencies and audio specialist demand-side ad platforms (DSPs). The company also aims to improve its brand safety platform by adding more contextual targeting functionality and campaign personalization, make its brand integrity and contextual signals available in the bidstream, expand its publisher network, and expand its global reach by developing its foreign-language parsing capabilities.

Barometer provides brand safety and contextual targeting solutions for digital audio advertising, using AI and NLP to analyze podcast content for sentiment and relevance. Its main product is the Brand Integrity Cloud, which includes a media planning platform for advertisers to check content scores and host intelligence sentiment scores. Barometer also offers a contextual targeting solution that groups podcasts using shared contextual signals based on the IAB's content taxonomy.

Analyst QuickTake: Barometer joins a growing list of marketing automation startups specializing in audio advertising such as Audion and Gumball , which have successfully raised funding. This has reflected the growing interest in audio-based mediums such as podcasting and audio streaming, which are among the fastest-growing marketing channels.