Why NY Angels Invested in Measure Studio-AI Driven Social Analytics Platform

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David: While social media and AI are rewriting the advertising playbook, one question hasn’t changed. Are my messages working? Marketers know how many people see and hear their posts and ads, but which ones resonate and actually generate business? On this New York Angels edition of The Angel Nest, we meet Measure Studio and learn how they answer those questions and the list of impressive names on their client list. Welcome back.

David: I’m David Hemenway. I’m a five-time founder and a member of the New York Angels where we fund and mentor great young companies. It’s a pleasure to welcome Measure Studio co-founder Thomas Kramer and Dan Zitting, the New York Angel member who sits on the board of Measure Studio and has provided important guidance as the company grows. Thanks so much to you both for joining us.

Thomas: Yeah, great to be here, David.

Dan: Yeah, thanks so much for having us.

David: So right after this, we’ll speak with board chair Cindy Cook about how New York Angels is investing in the age of AI and what next year looks like. So gentlemen, it’s got to be the oldest question in marketing — are people getting my messages and is it convincing them to actually buy? Thomas, how does Measure Studio figure that out?

Thomas: Yeah. So we really do two things to feed insight into AI and help people figure this out. The first thing is we will actually look at everything about a social media post. We’ll plug in images, video, links that might be connected to it, text that might accompany it into a classification model. And from there, that spits out all kinds of things. One, it summarizes what the thing is about — kind of a little essay about it — but also pulls out all kinds of individual elements like a brand sponsorship, a product that the post is about, or even softer things like production qualities: is this sad? Does it provoke an emotional reaction of some kind? Is it shot outdoors? All kinds of things like that. So feeding into an AI and helping it understand what it’s even looking at.

Thomas: And that’s really important because the AIs that you and I work with every day, like ChatGPT and Claude, they can’t go and crawl social media platforms. You can’t ask it a question like, “What are my posts that are about iPhones? How are they performing on TikTok?” It can’t go and view that stuff. So you need to pre-process that data and feed it in.

Thomas: The second thing we do is look at all of the performance data associated with that social post, with ads that may accompany that social post, and benchmark that performance. Relative to your account’s typical performance, did this perform better or worse than normal? And how much better or worse? And how has that changed over time? Because everyone’s just riding the wave of a distribution algorithm — what it means to perform well changes constantly. So by feeding those two things — what is the post about, and is it performing well or poorly — into a modern LLM, you basically give it superpowers. It can analyze thousands of posts at once and give you really specific guidance about what production qualities correlate with performance, or what products are popping or not. So there are all kinds of different use cases once you get that data set into AI. That’s how we do it.

David: So Dan, I feel like the nature of marketing has changed so much. We used to blast out messages and hope somebody responded. But now we can tailor the message because we know so much about the audience.

Dan: Yeah. And we know so much about the audience. But what was very compelling to me about Measure Studio was that it felt like we’ve gone so far to measure the reach of media — impressions, follows, all these things — and then we would make conjectures about what that meant about the content. Measure Studio closed that gap and said: did what we put out there in the first place even matter? Was it interesting, no matter how much money or social influence or brand we put behind it? That’s what Thomas and team do that’s really compelling.

David: And that’s very important because we all have so many messages coming at us. We probably don’t even notice most of them.

Thomas: Yep. And that’s why a lot of people choose our product — because we draw a line between what is that organic activity you just acquired by publishing versus what did you pay for? There’s not really a great solution out there for putting those two things together, at least not that I’ve seen in market, and that’s why we built it. It can be very clear: hey, this thing overperformed organically. Maybe this is a great piece of advertising. There are production qualities or subject matter we can carry into our ad strategy. And vice versa — there might be ads that are working really well and we want to take that strategy and apply it to the organic feed.

David: So I’m curious — what do marketers get from your platform that they don’t get from the native social media platforms?

Thomas: So first off, if you are a company managing multiple profiles, all that data is siloed. I have an Instagram profile, I have a TikTok, I have a LinkedIn page — I have to go collect that data centrally to analyze it, make a weekly report for the CMO, or do some data analysis and say, how can we improve our content strategy? We centralize all that data. Some of our customers have several hundred accounts they’re tracking, or even thousands at the company level. So that’s a real scale issue.

Thomas: The second thing we do that’s different is we collect that data at a much higher level of granularity than the native platform tools offer. Most of those tools — if you log into Instagram today and look at a post — will say, hey, this post got a million views. Okay, maybe that post is six months old. When did those views happen? Is it still generating viewership or is it dead? If you don’t capture that data at daily or hourly intervals, you can’t answer questions like: what did my library do versus my new content this month? We snapshot it so you can answer those types of questions.

Thomas: The platforms have started adding LLMs into it — Meta has Muse, YouTube Studio has Gemini. But again, it’s siloed. They look at one account at a time. They’re not looking at the actual content when you’re trying to say, what is my stuff doing this month? That’s really where we come in. We package all that data together and then you can use our AI or plug it into Claude or ChatGPT and use the latest frontier AI — not the cheap free one Muse gives you.

David: So Dan, as you look at all of the marketing opportunities that come through New York Angels, is this kind of a picks-and-shovels approach that you’ve taken? What made you want to invest with Thomas?

Dan: I suppose in some respects it is a picks-and-shovels approach. What attracted me was that I thought it went a whole level deeper — it’s not just about measuring performance, but actually answering why it performed that way based on what’s in the content. I didn’t previously really understand the complexity of running social media at, say, a large media company. If I run a large media company with movie studios, it’s not that I have a social media account for my production company — I have one for every movie, one for every character in every movie, and now I replicate every one of those across five or six platforms. The scale is super complex.

Dan: And being able to answer questions that deep and granular, across that many platforms and that many accounts — to me, that was a level of lifting that nobody was doing, and Thomas and team decided to put in the hard work to do it, day to day, not just in the aggregate.

Dan: I think it is a picks-and-shovels approach. And what also really attracted me about the team is that Thomas is a great product manager. He listens to where the customer wants to go, as opposed to just pursuing his own vision. The customer has guided them toward: I have lots of AI tools, but nobody puts the granularity together where I can really see the big picture in a useful way.

David: And you’re the New York Angel member on the board. So Thomas, what’s it been like having an investor on your board?

Thomas: Oh, great. Dan has been particularly helpful with helping us think about how we structure the commercial team and how we’re moving forward with our go-to-market motion. He’s an active operator himself. So it’s always great to compare notes, especially on how go-to-market has changed in just the last couple of years. AI has completely changed things like email outreach, for example. So it’s nice to validate that the ground is shifting beneath our feet — and also ask, what are other people doing about it? What are they finding impactful? That’s been particularly helpful.

David: And it’s so much a part of the fun, Dan — being involved with the companies rather than just writing a check.

Dan: Yeah, for sure. I would say somewhere north of 50% of my ROI on being a New York Angel is the learning exercise that comes from meeting great people and teams like Thomas and what they’re doing.

David: So Thomas, tell us about the new clients you’re bringing on and what the next year looks like.

Thomas: Yeah. We’ve found our stride really with major media companies and multi-brand companies. Of the ones I can talk about — digital-first media companies, things like Wave Sports, Whistle, Football Co. — these companies have a handle for every sport imaginable, or they’re developing new IP like podcasts or content with prominent athletes. So they have that multi-brand problem. They are monetizing actively on social media, on YouTube, on Facebook. So getting the data in isn’t always just an exercise in content strategy — sometimes it’s pure moneyball. What are the things the platform is going to monetize at the highest rate?

Thomas: And a lot of times they want to empower their commercial team. As a media company, you’re fighting for the same brand sponsorships in a space like sports. So what they’ll do is track all of their competitors and adversaries in the space. Our tool with AI is extracting all those brand partnerships. Then they can say, Mastercard upped their spend last month on college football content — we’re going to go after them next season because our highlights format is outperforming our competitors. Lots of great use cases emerging beyond pure data science. It’s about actually helping these companies make money, not just get likes, which I always love.

Thomas: And then a lot of brands I’m under NDA on — streamers you watch every night. They want to understand: do trailers that lead with a beloved character do better than leading with a different one? Does this superhero IP outperform the competitor’s? All kinds of interesting data questions are coming through the tool. It’s really fun to watch.

David: Great. Thomas Kramer, co-founder of Measure Studio, figuring out what works in social media. And Dan Zitting, his New York Angel, who is also on his board of directors. Congratulations to you both. Please come back and tell us how it’s going.

Thomas: Absolutely. Thanks for having us.

Dan: Thank you, David. Always a pleasure.

David: Always a pleasure to welcome our board chair, Cindy Cook, back to the studio to catch up on what has been a very busy year at New York Angels. Cindy, we hear from founders that it’s hard to raise money, but New York Angels is very active.

Cindy: We are. We’re having actually a really banner year, one of our best. And we also hear that a lot of angel groups are having trouble keeping members and investing enough — and that’s definitely not the case with us. Thus far this year, only through October, not even the full year, we’ve invested $15 million across 30 different companies. It’s just been exciting. Over the summer alone, about $4 million. We’ve had a number of big deals and we’re putting more money into the deals as well. So we have more deals and we’re putting more money into them. It’s been a very robust year.

David: Good year in terms of investments. Do you think that’s because of the composition of New York Angels?

Cindy: I think it’s a number of different factors. We have an excellent reputation and do a number of things across the marketing sphere to get the word out. I also think it’s our members. We’re at about 155 members — up about 10%. And what’s interesting about our members is we really cover expertise across the board. We’ve layered in a lot of new members who are still working and are therefore somewhat younger, and they bring a lot of other skills, particularly in tech. So it’s the breadth of expertise, the reputation of New York Angels, and some of the AI tools we’re using to attract founders and get the word out. We’re also more involved in the ecosystem — working with accelerators and other angel groups more assertively. So we have better deal flow coming in and we’re getting quality members coming in. We’ve been successful on both fronts this year.

David: And we have a whole group now focused on connecting with other groups and even working with VCs to bring in the best deals.

Cindy: Exactly. We have people who go to all sorts of events around the city and in other parts of the country — they’re kind of our scouts. When they find interesting things they feel are investable and want to bring back to the group, they do. So we have a lot of active members, angels, and other partners who bring good deals to us, including our sponsors.

David: And it seems as though things may be moving even more in our direction, in that VCs are feeling displaced now — with AI you can start a successful company on so much less money than you used to be able to.

Cindy: Yeah, VCs — from all we hear, and many of our folks are involved in VCs as well — it’s a tougher environment for them. A lot of the diligence that would pour a lot of analysts into can now be done through AI. And in terms of how companies need capital — with all the AI tools, startups have fewer people and can put an MVP together with less resources. The hypothesis is they’ll need less capital to get into business. They may just need angel capital or seed capital and not so much from VCs. So we’re in a good position for that as well. And all of this is happening at a time when we’re raising more capital than ever.

David: And the sidecar funds have been very successful as well.

Cindy: Yes. That’s actually a really great feature of New York Angels — a fund that invests alongside the most popular investments. It gives members an even greater way to diversify, because you’re getting into the deals that the most angels got into. As an individual, nobody can invest in everything, but the funds give you a lot more options to build a more diverse portfolio. And we spin up a new one every couple of years, so there’s always activity on that front.

David: So the tough question, Cindy — what’s left to do in 2027?

Cindy: In 2027, we’re going to build upon our success and particularly deepen our use of AI across the organization. We have a number of different tools we’re testing, and we’re going to do it in a methodical way — to continue to get quality deal flow at the top of the funnel, to continue to bring in new members. We’ve gained members about 10%, and about a third of the members coming in are women, so we’re continuing to diversify our membership base. And we have a new tagline: “Investors for Founders.” That kind of sums us up. Angel investing by its nature is a personal business. We invest in founders we connect with. We put someone on the board or have a deal lead who stays in touch. We have personal relationships throughout the process. And then once we invest, we open our Rolodexes to help people make connections. We have the expertise and we use it.

David: That’s the most fun of all — when you can help a founder get a new client or make a financing connection or do something they weren’t expecting when they came into New York Angels.

Cindy: And our best founders know how to ask for it too. We offer, but not every founder takes us up on it. So the best members are the ones who reach out and help the founders, and the founders who know how to reach out and ask for help from the members.

David: That’s great. Cindy Cook, thanks so much — the very busy board chair at New York Angels. We’ll check in with you early next year.

Cindy: Thanks so much.

David: You can learn more about joining New York Angels or applying for funding for your startup at newyorkangels.com. And you can find contact information for our guests today or reach me with your comments, questions, or suggestions at theangelnest.com. A reminder that we don’t make or recommend investments at The Angel Nest and this program is for informational purposes only. We produce The Angel Nest from New York, the home of the New York Angels and still the media capital of the world, with help from Rob Higley, David Newhoff, and today Charles DiMantebello at the controls of CDM Studios just west of Times Square. I’m David Hemenway. Thanks for tuning in. So long until next time.