May Haim
Kotlarsky.

The dossier.

May Haim Kotlarsky is, as of July 2025, the CEO, General Counsel and Board Director of The Brief, an AI marketing platform headquartered on paper in Paleu, a village in western Romania, and in practice split between Bihor County engineers and Bay Area operators. Three job titles on one business card sounds like a satire of small-company org design. At a thirty-nine-person shop that just relaunched under a new name, it is instead a fairly accurate description of the work.

The Brief is what happens when you take Creatopy, a Romanian design-automation company that had been around since 2008, and rebuild it around AI agents. In November 2025 the rebrand went public. The pitch is an "end-to-end AI agency" that runs four loops: Discover competitor ads, Create the assets, Launch the campaigns, Optimize the results. Nearly ten thousand brands, the company says, are already on the platform, including Lindt and AstraZeneca. The company also says it delivers ninety percent faster campaign launches. Companies say a lot of things.

What is verifiable, and more interesting, is who is running it. Kotlarsky's career reads like a tour of the platforms most of the internet depends on. She did four years at Meta as Associate General Counsel on the Monetization AI team, arriving in March 2021 and leaving in July 2025 to take the CEO job. Before that she was Director of Privacy Counsel at GitHub. Before that, Head of Legal at Rakuten Viki. Before that, Business and Legal Affairs at Live365. And before all of that, an Israeli law student, an associate at Gornitzky and Kardan in Tel Aviv, and a stint in the IDF.

If you are looking for a founder-flavored origin story here, you will not find it. Kotlarsky is a lawyer. She has an LLB from The Hebrew University of Jerusalem and an LLM in Corporations, Securities and Financial Regulation from Georgetown Law. She is admitted to the California Bar, Licensee #802080, which is the sort of detail that sounds tedious until you notice it is a durable public record - a small piece of paperwork stapled to a career that has otherwise been about writing paperwork for other people's platforms.

The rebrand, and the promotion

The interesting question about The Brief is not whether AI can generate advertisements. Everyone knows AI can generate advertisements. The interesting question is who is going to be trusted to sell AI-generated advertisements to companies like AstraZeneca, whose lawyers will read every line of the contract and every pixel of the creative. The Brief's answer, at least on paper, is: a lawyer.

This is not a joke. The last four years of Kotlarsky's career were spent at Meta advising the group of people who decide how ads get monetized on Facebook and Instagram - which is another way of saying, the group of people whose decisions get regulated in Brussels, sued in California, and dragged in front of Congress. If you have any question about what the actual constraint on AI advertising is going to be in the next decade, the honest answer is: it is not the models. It is the people who decide what the models are allowed to say. Kotlarsky spent four years being one of those people. Now she is the person on the other side.

A note about the org chart

TheOrg lists Kotlarsky under three titles at once: CEO, General Counsel, and Board Director. It is easy to read this as a small-company workaround, and partly it is. A thirty-nine-person company does not need a nine-person C-suite. But it is also a real statement about the kind of company The Brief is trying to be. Most AI marketing platforms are trying to sound like design tools. The Brief is trying to sound like a law firm that happens to make ads: brand safety templates, enterprise-grade security, compliance-conscious localization, an "AI agency" that operates inside the guardrails you would draw around a real one.

The Brief raised a $10 million Series A in October 2023, back when the name on the door was still Creatopy. The revenue estimate that circulates in databases sits around $16.7 million. Neither number is huge in adtech, and both are consistent with a company that is still figuring out what its next act looks like. The rebrand and the CEO appointment are the answer to that question, or at least an attempt at one.

The quirks, in order

Kotlarsky's public digital footprint is smaller than you would expect for a CEO. There is a GitHub account, MayHK, with two public repositories and five followers, one of which is labeled My first repo :). There is an X account, @mayhaim, that is mostly quiet. An Instagram handle, @maymay.hk. A Medium page. A LinkedIn that lists the résumé fairly cleanly. Compared to the average AI founder, this is almost restrained. It reads like the digital hygiene of someone who has spent a decade advising other people on their digital hygiene.

The other quirk is geography. The Brief is a company whose CEO sits in Belvedere Tiburon, California - a small town on the north side of the Golden Gate Bridge - while the company itself files papers from Paleu, a village in Bihor County, Romania, near the Hungarian border. Thirty-nine people, most of them presumably in Romania, servicing something on the order of ten thousand brand customers globally. This is a very 2020s org chart. It is also the kind of thing that makes a general-counsel-as-CEO make a lot of sense: employment law, cross-border tax, intercompany agreements, the boring plumbing of running a distributed startup, is exactly the sort of work that eats a general counsel's day and that a CEO who understands it has an edge on.

What she is actually building

The Brief's product story, stripped of the marketing, is a bet that the fragmented state of the current advertising stack - one tool for competitor research, one for creative production, one for publishing, one for analytics - is inefficient enough that a single integrated product can peel off the seams. The four-agent architecture is that bet, expressed as a product. Discover watches competitors on Meta, Google and LinkedIn. Create generates the ads. Launch pushes them out. Optimize reads the results.

None of this is technically novel; components of it exist in a dozen other places. What is novel, or at least distinctive, is packaging it under a brand ("The Brief") that sounds like it was named by a lawyer and marketed as an "AI agency" that sits alongside a marketing team rather than replacing it. The company's tagline, "machine precision, human brilliance," is the sort of phrase that sounds like every other AI company's tagline until you notice that it is doing actual work: it is telling regulated brands that the humans keep the veto.

The other thing the tagline is doing is inoculating the company against the AI-slop critique that hangs over the entire generative-advertising space. If you spent four years at Meta watching arguments about generative AI in ads move from novelty to regulation, the correct commercial move is probably to sell not autonomy but assistance, not replacement but leverage. That is what The Brief is selling. Whether it works is a story for 2027.

The résumé, briefly

• LLB, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem
• LLM in Corporations, Securities & Financial Regulation, Georgetown Law
• Israeli Defense Forces
• Gornitzky & Co., Tel Aviv; Kardan / International Investment & Holding Group
• Live365 (2013 - 2015), Counsel, Business & Legal Affairs
• Rakuten Viki (2015 - 2019), Head of Legal & Corporate Counsel
• GitHub (2019 - 2021), Privacy Counsel, then Director of Privacy Counsel
• Meta (2021 - 2025), Associate General Counsel, Monetization AI
• The Brief (July 2025 - ), CEO, General Counsel & Board Director

Common questions