Advertising can arrange to meet you on almost any screen. Asking it to explain the bill is a more delicate social engagement. Adam Helfgott has spent years working on that awkward introduction: between the people who pay for an advertisement, the machinery that delivers it, and the evidence that anything useful happened.
His career has travelled from summer-camp software to streaming television, with a long detour through cryptography. In 2023, Madhive, the company he co-founded, announced a $300 million investment from Goldman Sachs Asset Management. Three years later, his attention is on a smaller company and a finer question: which decisions in an automated advertising transaction actually earn their keep?
There is an appealing lack of glamour to the question. The advertising business has abundant occasions for champagne; it has fewer opportunities to inspect the plumbing. Helfgott keeps finding reasons to go downstairs.
A dorm room, before the streaming wars
The early enterprise was eCamp. Helfgott’s account of the business places its beginning in a dorm room in 1998, serving campers and their families. He lists himself as a founder and CTO, with the company acquired in 2006. Before connected television became his professional territory, he was building software for a much more bounded community.
It makes a useful opening chapter because the audience was specific. Summer camps were a real setting, with real people who needed a way to stay connected. A network could be useful without first becoming everybody’s network. Later, reflecting on eCamp, he would describe an opportunity that might have been imagined more broadly: something resembling a teenage social platform before social media acquired its familiar shape.
Lookbooks followed in his entrepreneurial history, another business he helped build and sell. His education includes a BA from the University at Albany; his working record also includes Lockheed Martin and advisory relationships with technology companies. The recurring occupation is the builder’s: writing or shaping the systems through which other people conduct their business.
That continuity is more revealing than a parade of job titles. Summer camps, creative businesses and television sellers have little reason to attend the same conference. All have practical difficulties that software can either resolve or make exquisitely expensive.
The television audience had moved house
Madhive was founded in 2016. Helfgott and fellow co-founder Tom Bollich were looking at a television business whose pictures were moving onto internet connections, while much of its commercial machinery still belonged to an earlier arrangement. A local seller could know the advertisers in town and still need help reaching the audience now watching through streaming services.
Helfgott’s reasoning began with a technological expectation: television would increasingly arrive over internet protocol. The business opportunity was to help local sellers follow their viewers. Madhive built tools for planning, targeting, buying and measuring connected television campaigns, putting several stages of the transaction into one system.
The local emphasis gave the work a practical test. A car dealer wants people who might visit the showroom. A furniture shop needs customers within a plausible journey of its doors. Neither is especially served by a magnificent audience in the wrong place. Television’s reach becomes more useful when a buyer can connect it to a particular market and a particular goal.
“We believe local television and media are important to communities.”
Adam Helfgott, 2023
That commitment helps explain the choice of customer. Madhive worked with broadcasters including FOX, Scripps and TEGNA. Its technology could operate behind the customer’s own offering, giving local media sellers access to streaming capabilities without requiring every advertiser to become an advertising engineer. The machinery mattered because someone else had to use it on an ordinary working day.
His approach to television measurement was similarly practical. Panels could help establish who was watching; automatic content recognition on smart televisions could establish what was playing across a broader set of devices. He argued for combining the two, rather than conducting an elaborate contest between them. The point was to give buyers a better basis for deciding what to pay and where to spend. That is a characteristic problem in this part of his career: apparently rival systems turn out to contain different pieces of information. The engineering task is to make those pieces useful together.
Helfgott also argued that national advertising could learn from local buying. A national budget need not behave identically in every market. It could be adjusted where customers were responding or where a brand needed to improve its position. The map, in this account, was something a campaign could act upon.
A large cheque, a change of chair
On June 13, 2023, Madhive announced its agreement for the $300 million Goldman Sachs investment. Seven years after its founding, the business had attracted a significant equity commitment for its next stage. The announcement put the emphasis on expanding the platform’s adoption and pursuing additional markets.
The transaction also marked a change in Helfgott’s daily job. He would move from CEO to strategic advisor and chairman of the board, with president Spencer Potts becoming CEO. Helfgott described his intended focus as product and business strategy. A founder’s relationship with a company can change without the technical questions that drew him to it being settled.
The size of the deal makes an arresting marker. The less theatrical detail is that much of Madhive’s work happened behind other companies’ names. Infrastructure businesses can become consequential while remaining unfamiliar to the people who encounter their work. The viewer sees an advertisement; the local seller sees a campaign; somewhere beneath both sits the system that helped arrange the meeting.
Today Madhive’s leadership page lists Jim Wilson as CEO. Helfgott remains connected to the company through its board. Calling him its current chief executive would freeze a moving career at precisely the moment it became more interesting.
Privacy, with the mathematics left in
Alongside the television business ran Helfgott’s interest in cryptography. In 2018, he explained online privacy by starting with an ordinary physical limitation: one person cannot simply read another person’s thoughts. Computers, he argued, needed ways to preserve boundaries people already took for granted away from a screen.
His work with MAD Network, later AliceNet, and Valence belongs to that part of the story. The questions concern how data can be authenticated, shared and accounted for, while preserving control over it. These are technical matters with commercial consequences: a record of where information came from can also help establish who contributed value.
There was a collective version of the effort, too. AdLedger brought industry participants together around standards and transparency. Its early meetings involved Madhive, IBM and TEGNA; the consortium incorporated in early 2018. Campaign reconciliation and privacy compliance were among its initial working areas. An advertising transaction crosses several companies, so improving its records requires more than one company agreeing to keep them.
By 2024, Helfgott was openly impatient with treating blockchain as a category of business in itself. He described it as an engineering utility. A tool ought to justify its presence through the work it does. Even an elaborate technological wardrobe must eventually turn up for a job.
The next question is inside the decision
Precise.ai emerged in 2024 from the combination of Jesse Redniss’s Qonsent business and technology developed at Helfgott’s Valence Labs. The initial proposition connected permission to collect information with the ability to verify its origin and track its use. Helfgott’s role was to advise on technology and engineering.
The company subsequently changed direction. Its earlier record-keeping work became a foundation for examining automated advertising decisions, and the Qonsent operation was wound down. Potts joined as CEO; the current team page identifies Helfgott as co-founder and chief technology officer. Their working relationship carried over from Madhive, while the task became more narrowly concerned with the economics inside a campaign.
Bids & supply paths
What did it cost?
Where should spend go?
In June 2026, Precise announced a $7 million seed round. At that point it was testing its approach through six pilots. The ambition was to evaluate what individual inputs contributed, beginning with relatively straightforward components such as audience segments. Those are useful limits to keep in view: a developing method, tested with buyers, rather than a declaration that advertising’s accounting has been solved.
Precise’s current offering describes measurement during a campaign, combined with a planner for considering changes in spending. It aims to preserve the information and reasoning behind results so people can audit them. For Helfgott, the route from privacy records to economic accountability has a recognizable logic. First establish what happened and where the data came from; then ask what each contribution was worth.
There is, fortunately, still dancing
A career told entirely through advertising infrastructure would give an unfair impression of its owner’s evenings. Helfgott’s public posts about Cannes have another vocabulary: friends, parties and music. In one, he called Richie Hawtin his favourite DJ and looked forward to putting the pens down and dancing. The yellow sunglasses in his Cannes interview photograph do their own small service to the record.
His advice to would-be builders has been comparatively grounded. Develop a skill, become useful to somebody or an industry, and allow the work to suggest a path. That sits comfortably beside a career whose businesses have changed more often than its underlying interests.
The next test will be practical. Can a system make an automated advertising decision understandable enough to improve the next one? Can the people paying for the campaign see which parts deserve their money? Helfgott has arrived at those questions through camps, television and cryptography. Advertising has become very good at finding an audience. He is still asking it to bring the paperwork.