Alex Halliday has been building on the internet for so long that he has watched it reinvent itself three separate times. He was there for the ad-supported early web, for the social-networking boom, and now for the shift where people ask a chatbot a question instead of scanning ten blue links. Most founders get to ride one of those waves. Halliday keeps paddling back out.
Today he is the co-founder and CEO of AirOps, a platform that helps brands stay findable as search moves from Google to AI answer engines. In November 2025 the company raised a $40 million Series B led by Greylock at a $225 million valuation, bringing total funding to around $60 million. It is a serious number for a serious idea. But to understand why anyone would trust Halliday to build for the AI era, you have to go back to a teenager with a keyboard and a very early lesson about how fast the ground can move.
Chapter OneThe 13-year-old traffic baron
Halliday started making fan sites for television shows and pop stars at age 13. This was not a hobby that stayed small. By 2000, the network he had cobbled together was serving close to 30 million page views a month - a genuinely large audience for the era, funded by banner ads sold through agencies like DoubleClick, Engage and ValueClick. For a kid still in school in Barnet, north London, it was a working business.
Then the dot-com advertising market fell off a cliff. Rates dropped from around $12 per thousand impressions to about 60 cents, almost overnight. The traffic was still there; the money simply evaporated.
This came to an abrupt halt in 2000 when ad rates went from $12 CPM to $0.60. The business was no longer viable.Alex Halliday
It is the kind of thing that either sours someone on the internet forever or teaches them a lesson they never let go of. For Halliday it was the second. The platforms change. The rules change. What matters is whether you have built something the next shift cannot simply take away from you. That idea shows up again and again in everything he has done since.
Chapter TwoDubai, Shoreditch, and a public company at 25
After finishing his A-levels at Queen Elizabeth's School in 2003, Halliday spent six months in Dubai building a news website. Quietly, on the side, he was also prototyping the social-networking software that would become his next act. He later spent time at the London School of Economics between 2005 and 2007, though he left without completing a degree - the pull of building was stronger than the pull of finishing.
In 2007 he co-founded SocialGO, a Shoreditch-based company that let anyone spin up and run their own private social network - a white-label alternative to the walled gardens that were then swallowing the web. His co-founder was Dominic Wheatley, a founder of the games publisher Eidos, the studio behind Tomb Raider and Football Manager. SocialGO grew to roughly six million users, and when it listed on London's Alternative Investment Market, Halliday became, at 25, the youngest CEO of a publicly traded company on the exchange.
Chapter ThreeSan Francisco, and learning to scale
In 2013 Halliday moved to San Francisco, arriving in what he later described as a kind of golden stretch for the city's tech scene. Founders gathered around places like Blue Bottle Coffee; he knew Sam Altman and his brother Jack in those years, and Jack would go on to invest in AirOps. It was a period of building relationships that would matter a decade later.
He worked across Teespring, LawPal and then MasterClass, where he became the company's first product hire. That is a load-bearing detail. Being first means building the product function from nothing, and Halliday helped take MasterClass from roughly $5 million to over $100 million in annual recurring revenue - one of the defining subscription products of the 2010s. He later served as VP of Product at Bungalow. By the time he was ready to start something of his own again, he had done the two things most founders only do one of: he had taken a company public, and he had helped scale one from small to enormous.
Companies are sitting on treasure troves of usage data they don't even recognize.Alex Halliday, on where great content really comes from
Chapter FourThe bet: marketing is becoming engineering
Halliday co-founded AirOps in 2022 with Matt Hammel and Berna Gonzales. The premise sounds simple and turns out to be anything but: help brands produce content that actually performs, at scale, using AI. The market's first instinct was to treat this as a prompt-and-publish problem. Type a request, get an article, ship it. Halliday's team learned the hard way that production-grade output is a different animal - closer to a manufacturing line than a magic box.
It takes a lot of testing, it takes a mixture of models, different retrieval strategies. It takes reflection of models to ensure they're checking their own work.Alex Halliday
In his telling, the good stuff lives inside workflows that can run 30 to 50 steps - stitching together multiple models, data integrations, retrieval, and human review. It took AirOps something like eighteen months to move from workflows that merely functioned to workflows that produced output a serious brand would put its name on. That gap, between a demo and a dependable system, is where he thinks the real value sits: not in the base models everyone can rent, but in the application and services layer built on top of them.
There is also a defensive edge to the thesis, and it rhymes with the lesson from 2000. As AI floods the internet with competent, generic writing, Halliday argues the only content that holds value is the content that is hard to copy - expert opinion, proprietary data, distinctive stories, the lived experience a model cannot invent. The commodity stuff gets absorbed into zero-click answers. The irreplaceable stuff is what keeps a brand visible.
He is fond of pointing out that most companies are already sitting on the raw material and do not know it. Support transcripts, product usage, sales calls, the questions customers actually ask - all of it is the kind of proprietary signal that generic content can never reproduce. AirOps' job, in his framing, is less about generating text and more about turning a company's own data into content that carries a fingerprint. That is a very different picture of AI marketing than the one most people imagine when they hear "AI wrote this."
Chapter FiveAfter the blue link
The reason Greylock and others just put $40 million behind AirOps is a shift Halliday saw coming earlier than most. Billions of searches are migrating from traditional engines to AI systems like ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini. When a person asks a chatbot instead of scrolling a results page, the entire logic of being discovered changes. There is no page-two to climb from; either the model cites you or it does not.
The old way of discovery is quickly becoming extinct.Alex Halliday
AirOps pitches itself as the system of action for that new world - analyzing where a brand stands in AI answers, deciding what to make, producing it through those long structured workflows, and measuring whether it moved the needle. Halliday talks about giving marketers three things: clarity, control, and confidence over their presence in AI search. He also has a phrase for the customers he most wants to serve - "moonshot marketers," the ones with ambitions that were simply not executable before this kind of tooling existed.
What is striking about Halliday is not any single company but the through-line. The teenager watching CPMs crater, the 25-year-old ringing the bell on a London exchange, the product lead scaling MasterClass, the founder now building for AI search - they are all working the same instinct. Get to a shift early. Build the part that is hard to replace. Assume the platform will change and make sure it does not matter when it does.
He has been right about the internet reinventing itself three times now. AirOps is his bet that he is early for a fourth.