ad-tech
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Fabric Media Built an Agency for the Moment the Map Stops Working
Fabric Media does not merely promote companies caught between television, advertising, data and technology. It builds the language, evidence and rooms that let those companies make sense to everyone else.
The Video Call That Became a 14-Billion-Request Ad Machine
When streaming costs outran ooVoo's advertising income, two operators kept the useful part: the machinery for finding, checking and selling attention. Krush Media is what happened next.
Index Exchange Wants to Shorten the Trip Your Ad Dollar Takes
The family-built ad exchange is opening its infrastructure to other companies. Its wager: fewer detours can mean better decisions, less waste and more money for the media people actually came to see.
Yieldmo Wants to Buy the Moment Your Thumb Slows Down
The ad tech company built its business around the gestures between seeing an ad and clicking it. Its next bet: pair the right creative with the right page before an advertiser spends a dollar.
Yahoo’s next act is hiding in your daily habits
The old web portal is putting AI into the inboxes, stock watchlists and sports routines people already use. Its advantage is a familiar front door. The hard part is making it worth opening again.
Albert.ai Put the Media Buyer on Autopilot
Albert moves real ad money, not just dashboard pixels. For large B2C teams willing to hand campaign execution to a machine, that is both the attraction and the due-diligence assignment.
VidMob Wants Receipts for Every Creative Hunch
The enterprise ad platform reads the logo, face, color, copy and timing inside every asset, then asks the question most dashboards dodge: what, exactly, made the creative work?
Shahid Butt Has Spent a Career Making Television Behave More Like the Internet
From bargain broadband to live TV on a laptop and addressable ads on offline set-top boxes, Shahid Butt's career follows one persistent idea: make complicated media technology useful to ordinary people.
Terri Walter Has Spent a Career Naming What Advertising Cannot Yet See
From the first 'Digital Mom' to the blind spots of AI-era advertising, Terri Walter has built a career around a stubborn question: what are marketers still failing to see?
INVIDI Put Digital Ad Logic Inside Television - Now It Has to Make Every Screen Behave
The Princeton ad-tech company made the old television set act a little more like the internet without turning the viewer into the product. Its next trick is harder: carrying that precision across streaming, live sports and hundreds of millions of boxes that are not even online.
Viamedia Kept the Cable Pipes - Then Built an Ad-Tech Engine on Top
For two decades, Viamedia sold the awkward local minutes inside cable television. Now it is using those same operator relationships to make fragmented, cross-screen advertising feel like one buy - a practical reinvention with lessons for any legacy business sitting on overlooked distribution.
The Ad-Tech Choice Hiding Inside Your Media Budget
The Trade Desk and Criteo can both buy an ad, but their histories, incentives and data advantages point in different directions. The useful question is not which platform wins. It is which job your budget needs done.
The Private Equity Firm That Refuses to Separate the P&L From the Point
One Planet Group owns the machinery that turns consumer intent into revenue, then uses the same operator’s discipline to back early-stage ideas. Its wager is unusually explicit: profit and purpose should share a balance sheet.
Radio’s Second Act Is Hiding in Plain Sound
Audacy still owns the morning commute. Now the 58-year-old broadcaster is turning local voices, sports obsession and a rebuilt balance sheet into an audio network that travels far beyond the dial.
OUTFRONT Media
The billboard business used to sell rectangles by the roadside. OUTFRONT is turning those rectangles - and thousands of screens below the street - into a measurable, programmable media network built for the real world.
Ask Media Group
Ask Jeeves taught the early web to accept a question in plain English. Three decades later, its corporate descendant became a sophisticated traffic-and-advertising machine - and a case study in what happens when a media business depends on someone else’s search ecosystem.
Scott McKinley
Scott McKinley is the founder and CEO of Truthset, an Oakland-based data validation company that scores the accuracy of consumer data used across advertising and marketing. A former captain of the 1988 US Olympic Road Cycling Team who walked away from the sport as doping spread, he spent roughly two decades in ad tech and martech - including a stretch as an EVP at Nielsen and CEO of IDify - before starting Truthset in 2019 to bring transparency and accountability to an industry he felt was full of unchecked claims about data.
David Weinfeld
David Weinfeld is the co-founder and CEO of Screenverse, a New York-based ad management and monetization company for digital screens in the physical world. Launched in April 2020 at the start of the pandemic, Screenverse now represents more than 100,000 digital out-of-home screens, from billboards and urban panels to Walmart pharmacy displays and digital jukeboxes. Before Screenverse, Weinfeld was Vistar Media's first supply sales hire, where he grew the partner network from 30 to over 120 global media owners. In 2024 the company raised $10.5 million from Volition Capital.
Screenverse
Screenverse is a New York-based digital out-of-home (DOOH) advertising company that helps mid-tier screen networks - from bar jukeboxes to Walmart health kiosks and luxury elevator panels - tap into programmatic ad demand. Founded in 2020 by DOOH veterans David Weinfeld and Adam Malone, it acts as an outsourced ad-sales and network-management partner, standardizing inventory, running ad operations, and optimizing pricing so media owners can earn revenue from platforms like The Trade Desk and DV360. The company operates one of the most diverse real-world screen networks, surpassing 100,000 digital screens across all 210 U.S. markets, and raised a $10.5M Series A from Volition Capital in April 2024.
Jonathan Frohlinger
Jonathan Frohlinger is the founder and CEO of Big Happy, a New York ad tech company that builds cinematic, story-driven 3D advertising across mobile and digital out-of-home (DOOH) screens. After years on the media-buying side spending over $100M and selling for firms like Verve, Starcom and Conde Nast, he started Big Happy in 2019 on a simple conviction: creative is a performance lever, not decoration. The company centralizes 3D creative production, media activation, targeting and measurement, runs on 1M+ DOOH screens and 7,000+ mobile publishers, and reports brand-recall and engagement lifts well above industry norms. Big Happy raised a $2.5M strategic round from Infolinks in 2024, was named Best Overall Mobile Marketing Company in the 2025 MarTech Breakthrough Awards, and in 2026 launched dynamic creative optimization for 3D DOOH and formed a board of advisors to scale creative-led omnichannel advertising.
Truthset
Truthset is an Oakland-based data intelligence company that validates the accuracy of consumer data used in marketing and advertising. Its patented TruthScore methodology assigns a 0-100% likelihood that any given data attribute about a person is actually true, letting brands, agencies, and data providers buy and activate audiences rated by accuracy instead of guessing. Truthset explicitly does not sell data or act as a broker - it positions itself as an independent arbiter of truth for a market where consumer data can carry up to 60% error.
Joveo
Joveo is a Menlo Park-based AI-powered recruitment marketing platform that helps employers, staffing agencies, and RPO firms attract and hire talent more efficiently. Founded in 2017 by Kshitij Jain, the platform manages programmatic job ad campaigns across 500+ job boards, social media, and search engines using AI-driven bid management and analytics. Joveo's suite — including Mojo Pro, Mojo Gro, Mojo Engage, and Mojo Go — covers the full hiring funnel from job distribution to candidate engagement, career site CMS, and unified analytics. The company has been on the Inc. 5000 list for four consecutive years and was named among the Top 25 AI Companies of 2025.
Jonathan Heller
Jonathan Heller is the chairman, founder and co-CEO of Firsthand, a New York AI startup building Brand Agents - AI representatives that talk directly to consumers on behalf of publishers and brands. An adtech lifer, he co-founded the online video advertising platform FreeWheel in 2007 and sold it to Comcast for roughly $360 million in 2014. At Firsthand he is reuniting with his old DoubleClick colleague Michael Rubenstein to argue that generative AI is not a better ad-serving engine but an entirely new medium for reaching people.
Alex Kelleher
Alex Kelleher is the founder and CEO of Quantum Rise, a Chicago AI consulting startup that raised a $15M seed in 2024 to pursue what he calls 'Consulting 2.0' - replacing billable-hours advice with heavy engineering and automation for mid-market companies. An Oxford-trained experimental psychologist, he has founded four data and decisioning software companies, with exits including Touch Clarity (to Omniture/Adobe), Cognitive Match (to Magnetic), and Vivid Edge. He went on to serve as Global CMO at Deloitte Digital and Chief Data Officer / President of Intelligence at Advantage Solutions. He is also a TED Global speaker and an exhibited artist.
Rakuten Advertising
Rakuten Advertising is the global affiliate and performance-marketing arm of Japan's Rakuten Group. Born as LinkShare in 1996 and acquired by Rakuten in 2005, it connects the world's top brands with publishers, creators and highly engaged audiences across 200+ countries. Today it pairs a pioneering affiliate network with AI-powered tools for fraud detection, partnership discovery and reporting, while pushing influencer and affiliate marketing closer together.
Brian Brown
Brian Brown is the Chief Business Officer of Brave Software, the privacy-first browser company founded by JavaScript creator Brendan Eich. Since 2016 he has led the business side of Brave's bet to rewire online advertising around consent and the Basic Attention Token (BAT), pitching publishers, brands, and platforms on a model where users get paid for their attention. A veteran startup operator, he co-founded and helped run cloud-computing pioneer Joyent (later acquired by Samsung), founded enterprise and software startups before that, and began his career in journalism and human rights work. He is a Vassar graduate and a marathon runner who likes to quote Aristotle when people ask him about success.
Vibe.co
Vibe.co is a New York-based ad tech company that turns connected TV into a performance marketing channel. Its self-serve, end-to-end platform lets brands of any size create, target, buy, and measure streaming TV campaigns from a single dashboard - with AI handling creative generation, audience targeting, and incrementality measurement. Founded in 2022 by serial ad-tech entrepreneurs Arthur Querou and Franck Tetzlaff, Vibe.co reached a $100M revenue run rate in under two years and raised a $50M Series B at a $410M valuation in September 2025.
Meta
Meta Platforms is the company behind Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Messenger, and Threads - a Family of Apps used by more than 3 billion people daily. Founded as Facebook in 2004 and renamed Meta in 2021, it runs one of the world's largest digital advertising businesses while pouring tens of billions into artificial intelligence (the open-weight Llama models and Meta AI assistant) and wearable computing (Quest headsets and Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses). In 2025 it reported roughly $201 billion in revenue.
OpenWeb
OpenWeb is a social engagement and monetization platform that helps publishers own the conversation on their own sites instead of renting their audiences to social networks. Founded in Israel in 2015 as Spot.IM and now headquartered in New York, it pairs comment sections, live blogs and polls with AI moderation and in-conversation advertising. The company works with 5,000+ publishers, reaches more than 150 million monthly active users, and reached a $1.5B valuation after a $170M Series F in 2022.
Tod Sacerdoti
Tod Sacerdoti is a two-time founder and prolific seed investor. He built BrightRoll into a video ad-tech powerhouse that Yahoo bought for $640 million in 2014, then reassembled the band to start Pipedream, a developer integration platform that Workday acquired in early 2026. As a general partner at Flex Capital he has backed 400-plus companies at the seed stage, including Chime, Vercel, Replit and Mercury.