Sunil Kumar’s explanation of location intelligence began with a pizza shop. In a 2019 conversation, he described the pitch he might make to an owner in Burlingame, California, where he said he lived. How many people nearby ate pizza? How many came through this particular door? What would it take to bring a few more of them inside?
His example used 10,000 pizza customers and a shop attracting 800 of them in a month. Moving that second number to 850 or 900 would give the owner something useful to consider. These were illustrative figures, not a published customer result. The distinction matters: Kumar was explaining how to begin a conversation, with a piece of the customer’s world that the customer could recognize.
A local restaurant makes a demanding audience for a technology pitch. The owner has rent to pay and ovens to fill. An elaborate account of mobile data may be perfectly correct and still leave the room hungry. Kumar’s example gave the machinery a purpose before asking anyone to admire it.
That concern with the practical result runs through his years at GroundTruth, the company he co-founded and later led as chief operating officer and chief executive. Advertising could produce an abundance of numbers. He wanted one of those numbers to describe someone turning up.
The engineer before the storefront
Kumar’s working life began further inside the machinery. He worked at the University of New Hampshire’s Interoperability Labs, then as a network architect at Cisco, involved in router products and IOS architecture. His education joined three disciplines: mathematics at the University of Delhi, computer science at New Hampshire, and an MBA at Berkeley’s Haas School of Business.
Those subjects offer a useful way of reading the career that followed. A mathematical model needs sound inputs. A network needs its parts to communicate. A business needs someone prepared to pay for the result. Kumar’s subsequent work brought all three questions into the same room.
Before GroundTruth, he was a founder of V-Enable, which supplied voice-search services to mobile carriers including Verizon, Sprint and Cricket. A telephone could help someone find a business. The next commercial question was what happened after the search.
GroundTruth, originally known as xAd, began in 2009. Kumar’s early responsibilities included product and strategy. The company’s proposition depended on the idea that mobile location could reveal useful information about activity in the physical world. A phone was becoming a companion to shopping, travel and the ordinary business of going somewhere.
A larger business, a smaller unit of proof
On March 16, 2018, GroundTruth announced Kumar’s appointment as CEO. He had spent the preceding two years as COO. The company credited that period with double-digit growth and profitability, an increase of more than 300% in its data scale, additional patents and the introduction of its self-service Ads Manager platform.
His promotion therefore followed a substantial operating assignment. The work included extending the leadership team: Jeff Hackett in sales and Eric Hadley in marketing. Kumar would be based in Mountain View, California, with responsibility for a business operating internationally.
The tension was productive. The company could grow across countries while asking advertisers to judge it on something as small as a visit to one address. Large infrastructure, local accountability. The store door remained an unusually blunt instrument for testing an elaborate technology business.
As CEO, he also brought in Amit Goswami to lead engineering in July 2018. Goswami arrived after product and engineering work at Adswizz, bringing experience in building an advertising platform. The assignment at GroundTruth included scaling its location technology and supporting Cost Per Visit, a buying model organized around physical attendance.
Let the shopkeeper use the controls
Ads Manager put another part of Kumar’s argument into product form. Smaller businesses and agencies could use a self-service interface to access capabilities previously associated with larger advertisers and managed campaigns. Making a technology available required attention to how a customer would actually buy and operate it.
By January 2019, GroundTruth reported more than 1,500 active businesses on Ads Manager during the previous year, with more than 500 agencies and smaller businesses spending daily. Platform revenue had doubled in the second half of 2018. The company was also extending the platform to enterprise customers including iHeartMedia and OUTFRONT Media.
The interesting combination was access and scale. A small advertiser needed manageable controls. A large media partner needed a platform it could incorporate into its own work. Both wanted to connect advertising expenditure to activity beyond the screen.
“Our vision is to make location easily accessible to everyone.”Sunil Kumar / 2019
The sentence is ambitious, but it sets a concrete product test. Could a customer use the system without buying an entire organization to operate it? For the pizza-shop owner in Kumar’s example, access meant being able to act on an insight while the insight was still useful.
The awkward business of counting a visit
Of course, a dot on a map can be a poor witness. Someone may be beside a store, travelling past it, or in another part of a larger property. A business built around visits has to decide what it is willing to count.
Kumar described GroundTruth’s process in three stages: establish the device’s location, associate it with a place, then assess whether a visit occurred. Blueprints supplied mapped boundaries. Duration, speed, signal accuracy and opening hours helped inform the final assessment. The commercial promise rested on a succession of technical judgments.
There is a pleasing lack of glamour in checking store hours. Yet this is exactly where an attractive claim meets an inconvenient reality. Counting movement is easier than explaining it. The value lies in doing enough careful work to make the number meaningful to the person buying the campaign.
Privacy belonged in that calculation too. In his writing, Kumar treated consumer trust as an operating concern. GroundTruth appointed general counsel Christopher Yamaoka as chief privacy officer in April 2019, adding responsibility for a cross-department privacy team and the development and enforcement of practices across the company.
The appointment gave the concern an organizational owner. A business asking advertisers to trust its measurements also needed consumers to trust how it handled information. The quality of the output and the conduct of the company were connected.
When the software starts choosing
In November 2019, GroundTruth announced Visit Optimization for Ads Manager, with availability planned for January 2020. The tool used machine learning to adjust bidding toward physical visits. It represented a further step from describing an audience to helping choose how a campaign should run.
The announcement included a month-long beta test with Warrior Sports, which wanted people to visit retailers carrying its equipment. GroundTruth reported 33% more visits to a particular retail location and a 26% reduction in effective cost per visit. Those were results from a specific test, rather than a promise that every advertiser would experience the same change.
+33%visits to a specific location
-26%effective cost per visit
Rosie O’Meara joined as senior vice president of platform around the same period, with responsibility for Ads Manager’s development and sales growth and the revenue strategy of platform partnerships. Product capability and the means of selling it were advancing together.
By March 2020, the company had also earned a second consecutive TAG certification against advertising fraud. Kumar’s public response emphasized accountability. For a platform promising evidence, the integrity of that evidence was part of the product.
Eleven years, then another retail problem
In 2020, Kumar announced that he would step aside as CEO after more than eleven years at GroundTruth. His account traced the passage from co-founder and product strategist through the COO position to the chief executive’s office. He said he would remain close to the company as an adviser to its board.
The departure message also thanked Steve McCarthy, colleagues, customers, partners and directors. Kumar described the experience as “meaningful and fun.” It is a small phrase, and a welcome one. A career can be explained through titles; the reasons someone values it usually require other people.
McCarthy’s succession was publicly announced in October 2020. GroundTruth continued beyond its co-founder’s executive tenure. By 2024, O’Meara had become CEO, following her earlier work on the platform business.
Kumar’s own subsequent work kept him near the intersection of software and stores. In April 2023, he appeared as vice president and general manager of Walmart Commerce Technologies in the announcement of a collaboration with Infosys. The subject was Store Assist, software helping retailers manage picking and the handoff of orders for pickup, delivery and shipping from stores.
The practical problem had moved along the shopping journey. At GroundTruth, the question was how advertising could lead to a physical visit. With Store Assist, it was how a retailer could make an order move smoothly through the store. In both cases, a digital process had to survive contact with a real building, real employees and a waiting customer.
That is a useful place to leave Kumar’s story: somewhere between the calculation and the counter. His pizza-shop example survives because the arithmetic has an audience. Someone has to understand the number, believe it, and decide what to do next. Eventually, the door opens.