Company Profile / Video Technology / New York
EX.CO
The machine-learning video platform helping media companies turn video into revenue - on every screen.
The machine-learning video platform helping media companies turn video into revenue - on every screen.
In 2012, two founders in Tel Aviv built a tool for making internet quizzes. It was called Playbuzz, and for a few years it was everywhere - the kind of poll your relatives shared under a cousin's wedding photos. Then the traffic economics of viral content turned, and the company did something most startups only talk about: it changed what it was.
Today the company is EX.CO, and it does not make quizzes. It builds video technology for publishers - the online video platform, the player, the content management system, and, increasingly, the machine-learning engine that decides which clip a reader should see and how much a publisher can earn from it.
The pitch to media companies is narrow and unglamorous, which is part of why it works. Every publisher has a library of video nobody watches and an ad stack nobody fully understands. EX.CO's job is to fix both - to match the right video to the right article automatically, and to squeeze more revenue from each impression without locking the publisher into a single ad marketplace.
The company calls this being "demand-agnostic." In an industry built on walled gardens, choosing not to build one is the whole argument.
EX.CO packages what most publishers would otherwise stitch together from half a dozen vendors: hosting and delivery, a customizable player, a video CMS, a recommendation engine, and a yield engine that optimizes ad revenue across screens - web, mobile, connected TV, and digital out-of-home.
Newsrooms and media networks - Advance Local, Hearst Newspapers, The Arena Group, Ziff Davis, Autovia, Motorsport Network, Patch.com - that produce video but struggle to make it pay across their sites.
Video is expensive to produce and hard to place. Libraries sit unused; ad stacks leak revenue; matching clips to articles by hand doesn't scale. EX.CO automates the matching and the monetization.
Rather than steering inventory into one marketplace, EX.CO optimizes across demand sources with supply-path optimization at the center - aligning its incentives with the publisher's.
"Video technology fueling growth for media leaders."
- EX.CO company tagline
Selected results EX.CO publishes from client partnerships. Figures are company-reported and vary by publisher, format, and period - read them as case studies, not guarantees.
Source: EX.CO homepage case studies. Bars are illustrative of relative reported lift, not a common scale.
End-to-end hosting, management, and delivery of video across web, mobile, CTV, and DOOH.
Customizable, web-vitals-friendly video players, including a mobile-first vertical format.
A content system for organizing publisher libraries, playlists, and metadata.
Machine-learning yield engine and demand-agnostic ad server built to maximize revenue per impression.
Vectorizes article text, scores similarity against a publisher's video library, and serves the most relevant clip in real time - no manual tagging.
Thousands of premium licensed videos across verticals for publishers who need extra inventory.
EX.CO's 2024 engine is the clearest expression of what the company became. It uses large language models to turn each article into a vector - a mathematical fingerprint of its meaning - then measures how close that fingerprint sits to every video a publisher owns.
The closest, highest-quality match wins, ranked and served in real time. The result is video that fits the page without a human ever tagging it, integrated across an entire site rather than a handful of hero articles.
That capability didn't appear overnight, and it wasn't all built in-house. EX.CO acquired video adtech firm Cedato in 2021 for monetization plumbing, and machine-learning company Bibblio in 2022 for contextual targeting.
Two acquisitions, folded into one product. For a company its size, buying the teams that had already spent years on the hard parts was faster than building from zero.
Shaul Olmert and Tom Pachys launch a platform for interactive quizzes, polls, and lists for publishers.
A $3M round led by Carmel Ventures scales the interactive-content network.
Led by Viola Group, with The Walt Disney Company and Saban Ventures participating.
Tom Pachys becomes CEO; the company rebrands and pivots toward video technology.
Adds video monetization and ad-serving capabilities.
Strengthens contextual targeting and machine learning.
Launches its large-language-model contextual video engine, with Autovia as an early adopter.
Named to Inc. Best Workplaces amid continued publisher revenue gains.
Tom Pachys - Co-Founder & CEO. Started building websites at 12, studied at IDC, and was an early employee at video startup SundaySky before co-founding Playbuzz. Took the CEO seat in 2019.
Shaul Olmert - Co-Founder and Playbuzz's original CEO; stepped down in 2019.
Shachar Orren - Co-Founder & Chief Marketing Officer, recognized as a co-founder in 2021.
EX.CO has raised roughly $65M+ across several rounds. Backers read like a media-money roster: The Walt Disney Company, Saban Ventures, Viola Group, 83North, and Carmel Ventures.
The 2017 Series C - $35M led by Viola with Disney and Saban - remains the headline round. When your investors are also your market, funding buys distribution as much as runway.
“Stronger together. Always evolving. Radically transparent.”
- EX.CO's three stated values
EX.CO sits in the online video platform and video-monetization market, competing with names like Brightcove, JW Player, Kaltura, Connatix, Anyclip, and Primis. What separates it is less any single feature than a posture: it aims to be the publisher's ally rather than another demand source taking a cut.
That positioning matters more as third-party cookies fade and contextual, cookie-less targeting - EX.CO's specialty since the Bibblio acquisition - becomes the path forward. For a mid-sized company betting on the open web, being useful to publishers is the whole strategy.
Search these to find EX.CO interviews and product walk-throughs.
Profile compiled from public sources including EX.CO's website and blog, Wikipedia, Crunchbase, Tracxn, and press coverage. Figures such as revenue and funding are third-party estimates or company-reported and may be approximate. Company-reported client results are case studies, not guarantees.