The bioengineer who built the technology behind how broadcasters know you watched their ad
Manuel Gilioli's career runs along an unusual axis. You don't usually find yourself at the intersection of bioengineering, Silicon Valley ACR fingerprinting technology, and Eastern European enterprise IT. He got there the old-fashioned way: by following the problem, not the category.
He arrived in Silicon Valley with an M.S. in Bioengineering from the University of Padova and found his way to Hacker Dojo - the Mountain View tech hub where founders go to meet other founders. There he encountered Damian Scavo, a former algorithmic trader, and Loris D'Acunto, a nuclear physicist. Three people with no obvious overlap, one shared conviction that the media industry had no reliable way to measure what content people were actually consuming in real time. They incorporated Axwave in April 2012.
What followed was seven years of building proprietary Automatic Content Recognition technology - the kind of fingerprinting infrastructure that the BBC used to monitor commercial airplay, that Comscore deployed for media measurement, that Ipsos trusted for consumer research, and that the NBA relied on to track its own broadcasts. Axwave processed billions of queries monthly. Its Gsound consumer app hit a million downloads. The company filed six patents and picked up awards at SXSW, SF Music Tech, and the Siemer Wavemaker competition in 2014.
Samba TV acquired Axwave in August 2019. Gilioli didn't stop moving. He joined SORINT.lab - an Italian IT company founded in Bergamo in 1985, built on a flat-hierarchy holacracy model that calls its employees "SORINTiani" - and eventually became CEO of SORINT.lab Poland, the Wroclaw-based arm of a company now operating across 17 offices from California to Cameroon.
"A nuclear physicist, an algorithmic trader, and a bioengineer walked into a tech hub. They built something the BBC and the NBA depended on."
A trajectory through three continents and four industries
The ACR startup that broadcasters quietly depended on
Automatic Content Recognition is one of those infrastructure technologies that most people interact with without knowing it exists. When a broadcaster needs to know whether their ad actually aired on that regional TV channel at 9:47pm Tuesday, or when a media research firm needs panel data on what content people consumed this week - somewhere in that pipeline, there's a fingerprinting system doing the work.
Axwave's version of that system used smartphone microphones to capture media exposure privately and securely, then compressed, encrypted, and matched those fingerprints against a worldwide media catalogue. The technology handled live TV, time-shifted content, radio, OTT, and ads - without requiring any watermarking.
The company's client list - BBC, Comscore, Ipsos, the NBA - tells you something about the stakes. These aren't organizations that adopt experimental infrastructure lightly. Axwave was a quiet cornerstone of commercial monitoring in the US and Europe. Gilioli built and ran the technology stack that made it work.
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SXSW 2014Top 5 Most Innovative Companies
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SF Music Tech 2014Winner
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Siemer Wavemaker Award 2014Recipient
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Gsound Consumer App1,000,000 downloads
How Axwave's ACR Pipeline Worked
Leading SORINT.lab Poland: 40 years of Italian IT, reloaded for Eastern Europe
SORINT.lab is not a startup. It is a 40-year-old Italian technology company that has outlasted multiple generations of computing - mainframes, client-server, web, cloud, cloud-native - by staying close to the engineering rather than the hype. Founded in Bergamo in 1985 as "Societa ORobica per l'INformatica e la Telematica," it now employs 1,500+ professionals across 17 offices spanning Italy, Spain, the UK, Germany, France, Romania, Poland, the United States, and Cameroon.
Gilioli runs the Polish entity. That means leading a technology practice in Wroclaw - a city that has become one of Central Europe's most significant tech hubs - delivering the same suite of services that SORINT.lab has been refining since before the internet existed: DevOps consulting, CI/CD implementation, cloud adoption, application modernization, site reliability engineering, cybersecurity, data center management, and AI/ML services.
The company's client list includes Santander, Oracle, and Microsoft. Its 98% client retention rate is the kind of number that tells you something isn't being gamed. SORINT.lab Poland operates in one of the most competitive IT services markets in Europe, going up against global integrators with far more name recognition and winning through technical depth and a flat culture that keeps senior engineers engaged.
Gilioli carries his startup instincts into this work. A founder who built ACR technology for broadcasters, who filed six patents, who navigated a successful acquisition, brings a different playbook to enterprise IT delivery than someone who came up through the traditional consulting track. His Google Cloud Professional Cloud Architect certification signals where the work is heading: cloud-native infrastructure, Kubernetes, open source tooling - the same stack he managed at Axwave, now deployed at enterprise scale.