Lava Kumar is the co-founder and Chief Product Officer of Entropik, a Bengaluru-based Emotion AI company that reads human reactions across facial expression, voice, gaze and attention. After nearly two decades building products at Yahoo, Motorola, Wipro, Operative and Integral Ad Science, he returned from the US in 2016 to co-found Entropik and turn affective computing into a working business tool. He leads Decode, the company's integrated human insights platform, and has become a recognizable voice arguing that market research should measure how people actually feel, not just what they say.

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.
Shubham Mishra is the co-founder and Global CEO of Pixis, a Burlingame, California company building codeless AI infrastructure that lets marketers deploy AI models without writing code. He dropped out of BITS Pilani to build a virtual reality headset with the startup Absentia, then pivoted into AI-driven marketing and grew Pixis from an early bet on AI to roughly $85M in ARR, raising $209M across its funding rounds. His pitch is consistent: strip the friction out of AI so any team can use it in minutes, not months.
First Data Company is a Dubai-based marketing technology firm that turns anonymized transaction data into precise advertising audiences. Its machine-learning models aggregate purchase signals from retailers, mobile operators and online cash registers to predict what a customer is likely to buy next, then place relevant ads across Google, Facebook and programmatic inventory. Positioned for a cookieless world under the tagline "We know your customer," the company blends brand-building ("brandformance") with performance marketing and CRM personalization to lift sales for its clients.
Novosol is a Singapore-based mobile advertising and customer-engagement company behind moLotus, a patented GSM-based mobile video interaction platform. moLotus delivers personalized, interactive video messages directly to any mobile handset - no app download or data connection required - and can push millions of messages a day. Working through telecom operators such as Airtel, Vodafone, Indosat and Telkomsel, Novosol helps banks, retailers, automakers and consumer brands automate customer relationship processes while opening a new advertising revenue line for the carriers themselves.
Podeo is a Dubai-based podcast platform that gives creators an end-to-end toolkit to record, host, produce, distribute and monetize their shows. Started in Beirut and now the largest podcast platform in the Middle East and North Africa, it has onboarded more than 100,000 creators reaching an audience of roughly 50 million listeners. Its distinguishing move is distribution beyond the usual apps - pushing audio into radio stations, airlines, ride-hailing, gaming and chat apps - paired with a programmatic advertising model that keeps the service free for creators while sharing revenue as their audiences grow.
RevX is a programmatic demand-side platform (DSP) for mobile app marketers, using machine learning and data science to power user acquisition, retargeting, retention and monetization across in-app, web, social and connected TV inventory. Part of publicly listed Affle (India) Limited since 2019, RevX processes hundreds of billions of bid requests daily for 400+ global clients and has been repeatedly recognized in the AppsFlyer Performance Index, including top-ranked positions in iOS gaming remarketing in 2025.
Yango is a Dubai-headquartered technology company that started as a ride-hailing brand from the Yandex Taxi team in 2018 and has grown into a global everyday-services ecosystem. Operating in more than 30 countries across Africa, the Middle East, South Asia, Europe, and Latin America, Yango bundles mobility, food and grocery delivery, mapping, fintech, advertising, entertainment, and AI into locally adapted apps. Rather than owning fleets, it partners with local taxi companies and businesses, using a 'hyperlocal' playbook to tailor each product to regional cultures, currencies, and infrastructure.
Brian Stempeck is the CEO and co-founder of Evertune AI, a New York startup that helps brands measure and improve how they show up inside AI models like ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude and Perplexity. He spent 11 years on the executive team of The Trade Desk as employee number eight, serving as Chief Client Officer and later Chief Strategy Officer and a board member, and helped grow the company from a tiny team to a public company worth tens of billions. Before adtech he was a management consultant at Bain & Company and, earlier still, a political journalist. He founded Evertune in 2024 with former Trade Desk colleagues to build the category he calls Generative Engine Optimization.
Christian Facey is the co-founder and CEO of Audiomob, the London-based company that built the first non-intrusive audio advertising platform for mobile games. A former Google agency strategist and Facebook marketing science partner, he combined his advertising background with hobbies in game development and hip hop/jazz production to spot a gap: the mobile gaming and audio ad industries had never been connected. He launched Audiomob in 2020 with co-founder Wilfrid Obeng, raised a $14M Series A at a valuation north of $110M, and landed on the Forbes 30 Under 30 list in 2021.
Adsquare is a Berlin-based location intelligence company that turns real-world movement and behaviour into audience data marketers can use to plan, target, optimize and measure advertising campaigns. Founded in 2012, its mobile-first data exchange connects location, app-usage, demographic and offline signals to leading DSPs, SSPs and CDPs, powering geocontextual, proximity and audience targeting across mobile, online and digital out-of-home (DOOH). The platform is built privacy-first around consent-based signals and serves thousands of advertisers and dozens of platform partners across Europe, North America and Asia-Pacific.
Agentio is an AI-native advertising platform that lets brands buy, run, and measure creator ads at scale. Founded in 2023 by former Cameo president Arthur Leopold and former Spotify engineer Jonathan Meyers, it automates the end-to-end creator campaign lifecycle - matching brands with relevant YouTube (and now Meta) creators, briefing, brand-safety checks, contracting, payments, and real-time performance tracking. The company positions creator media as a programmatic channel, aiming to do for sponsored content what DoubleClick did for display advertising. It has raised $56.3M total, including a $40M Series B led by Forerunner in November 2025 at a $340M valuation.

Audiomob is a London-founded adtech company that pioneered non-intrusive audio advertising inside mobile games. Its SDK lets game developers earn revenue by playing short audio ads without interrupting gameplay, while advertisers reach a large, hard-to-access mobile gaming audience. Founded in 2020 by ex-Google and ex-Facebook engineers Christian Facey and Wilfrid Obeng, the company reaches hundreds of millions of monthly players across 160 countries and has raised roughly $16 million, including a $14 million Series A at a $110 million valuation.
Basis Technologies is a Chicago-based advertising software company that builds Basis, an automation and intelligence platform for digital media. Founded in 2001 as Centro and rebranded in 2021, Basis unifies programmatic, publisher-direct, search, social, and connected TV buying alongside campaign planning, workflow automation, reporting, and financial reconciliation - so agencies and enterprise marketers can run cross-channel media from a single system.
Big Happy is a New York-based advertising technology company that turns everyday screens into immersive, cinematic brand experiences. Founded in 2019 by adtech and media-buying veterans, it operates an end-to-end platform spanning creative development, media activation and campaign measurement across high-impact mobile formats and 3D digital out-of-home (DOOH). The company works with 300+ brands including Coca-Cola, Verizon, Samsung and the U.S. Army, reaching 7,000+ premium mobile publishers and over one million DOOH screens across North America.
Decide is a St. Louis-based advertising technology company - the rebrand of LockerDome, founded in 2008 - that runs a machine-learning platform called the Decision Marketplace. Rather than relying on third-party cookies or intrusive identity data, Decide lets multiple ML models compete in real time to select and price ad impressions, powering a two-sided marketplace that connects publishers and brands across the open web. Its widgets and content-recommendation units have reached over 100 million monthly users, positioning the company as a cookieless, performance-focused alternative to legacy programmatic ad stacks.
Dstillery is a New York-based predictive AI audience-targeting company for the advertising industry. It builds custom, model-driven audiences that let brands and agencies reach the right consumers programmatically, including through its patented ID-free cookieless technology and its DS-1 agentic AI platform that turns audience building into a natural-language chat. It works across major demand-side platforms such as The Trade Desk, Yahoo, and Microsoft Advertising, and counts a large share of the Fortune 100 among its users.
Evertune AI is a New York-based analytics and generative engine optimization (GEO) platform that measures and improves how brands appear inside AI assistants like ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and Perplexity. Founded in 2024 by veterans of The Trade Desk, it runs hundreds of thousands to over a million prompts per customer to score brand visibility, benchmark against competitors, and generate AI-optimized content. The company raised a $15M Series A in August 2025, led by Felicis Ventures.
EX.CO is a machine learning-driven video technology platform that helps publishers and media owners run, manage, and monetize video across web, mobile, CTV, and DOOH. Founded in 2012 as the interactive-content company Playbuzz and rebranded to EX.CO in 2019, the New York-based, Disney-backed company now offers an online video platform (OVP), a CMS, player technology, and an LLM-powered recommendation and yield engine used by publishers including Advance Local, Hearst Newspapers, The Arena Group, and Ziff Davis.
Good-Loop is an ethical advertising technology company that turns ad spend into a force for good. Its 'view-to-donate' formats let people unlock a free charitable donation - funded by the advertiser - simply by choosing to watch an ad, while its Green Media tools measure and cut the carbon footprint of digital campaigns. A certified B Corporation founded in Edinburgh in 2016 by Amy Williams and Daniel Winterstein, Good-Loop has raised more than $6M for charities including Save the Children, WaterAid and WWF, and works with brands such as Unilever, Nestle, Levi's and Asics.
Grocery TV is an in-store retail media platform that helps grocery retailers build, run and monetize digital screen networks at the front end and throughout the store. Operating the largest in-store retail media network for grocery in the U.S., it powers screens across 6,500+ stores through 120+ retailer partners, reaching roughly 1 in 4 Americans (95M+ shoppers weekly). Brands buy campaigns that run at the point of purchase, retailers earn incremental revenue, and Grocery TV supplies the hardware, content management system and measurement tying ad exposure to sales lift.
Hunch is a creative performance platform that unifies creative, media, and insights so paid-social teams can build, launch, and learn faster across Meta, Snapchat, and TikTok. Founded in Belgrade in 2018, it automates dynamic product ads, catalog product video, and hyper-local campaigns at scale, using AI to turn performance data into better creative. Its customers are mid-market and growth-stage e-commerce, retail, travel, and betting brands that want the automation power of enterprise tools like Smartly without the enterprise overhead.
Influ2 is a New York-based B2B advertising platform that pioneered contact-level, or person-based, advertising - the ability to serve ads to specific named decision-makers inside target accounts rather than anonymous account-level audiences. Founded in 2017 by Dmitri Lisitski and Volodymyr Mikhalko, the company ties every ad impression, click, and site visit back to an individual, then feeds those signals to sales teams so they know exactly who is engaging and what to say. Influ2 has raised roughly $17 million, counts customers like Capgemini, AppsFlyer, Chargebee, and Amplitude, and has expanded from advertising into buying-group intelligence with products such as Signals Center and Audienscope.
Dave Morgan is the founder and CEO of Simulmedia, a New York adtech company that pioneered data-driven linear TV advertising and now runs the cross-channel TV+ platform, the Skybeam self-serve CTV buying tool, and the PlayerWON in-game video ad network. A lawyer turned three-time adtech founder, he earlier built Real Media (a predecessor of 24/7 Real Media, sold to WPP for $649 million) and TACODA (a behavioral targeting pioneer acquired by AOL for $275 million in 2007). Morgan returned to Simulmedia's CEO seat in October 2024 to chase the connected-TV opportunity, and he is a long-running MediaPost columnist known for his '96/4' rule about the gap between CTV viewership and CTV ad dollars.
David Jones is the founder and CEO of The Brandtech Group, the digital-only marketing group he built to help global brands do their marketing better, faster and cheaper using technology and, increasingly, generative AI. A British executive who once ran the entire Havas network, he left the traditional agency world in 2014, raised hundreds of millions to launch You & Mr Jones in 2015, and rebranded it The Brandtech Group in 2022. Today the company operates in dozens of countries with thousands of employees and positions itself as the world's leading generative-AI marketing company. Jones also co-founded the youth leadership forum One Young World and wrote the book Who Cares Wins.
Narrative I/O is a New York-based data infrastructure company that makes incompatible data work together. Its platform automatically normalizes disparate datasets, resolves identity, and lets companies securely buy, sell, enrich, and activate data - increasingly delivered natively inside a customer's own Snowflake environment so no data has to move. Founded in 2016 by Nick Jordan and led since 2023 by CEO Tim Mahlman, Narrative serves marketers, data scientists, and enterprises including Nielsen, TransUnion, Experian, and Fanatics.
Olyzon is an AI-native adtech company building an agentic decisioning and orchestration layer for Connected TV (CTV) advertising. Founded in 2024 and headquartered in Paris with offices in New York and London, its platform sits on top of the fragmented CTV ecosystem - agnostic across every DSP, SSP and direct publisher - and uses AI agents to qualify inventory at the program level, plan and activate campaigns, adapt creative to viewing context, and normalize measurement into unified outcomes. The company has powered hundreds of campaigns for global brands and agencies, and closed a $10M Series A led by Sir Martin Sorrell and Sanja Partalo's S4S Ventures in May 2026.
Simulmedia is a New York adtech company that turns TV advertising into a measurable, performance channel. Founded in 2008 by Dave Morgan, it pioneered data-driven linear TV and now spans streaming, cable, broadcast, and in-game inventory through its TV+ media-buying platform, Skybeam self-serve tool, and PlayerWON in-game ad product. Its software plans, activates, optimizes, and measures campaigns across screens, backing managed buys with delivery guarantees and closed-loop measurement so advertisers of any size can reach and prove TV audiences.
The Brief is an AI marketing platform that runs the full advertising campaign lifecycle - discovering competitor and market signals, creating ads at scale, launching them across channels, and optimizing performance - through a system of four AI agents. Formerly the ad-design tool Creatopy, the company rebranded to The Brief in October 2025 to position itself as an 'AI agency' for in-house marketing teams and agencies, and reports nearly 10,000 brands using the platform.
Veridooh is an Australian adtech company and the global leader in independent out-of-home (OOH) advertising verification. Its patented SmartCreative technology collects ad-play-level data without relying on media owner systems, letting brands and agencies independently track, measure and verify static, digital and programmatic OOH campaigns across 400+ metrics in a single platform. Founded in Sydney in 2019 by Mo Moubayed and Jeremy Yang, Veridooh works with global brands including Google, Amazon, Unilever and McDonald's, and is the preferred verification partner for major agency groups including IPG Mediabrands, Omnicom and WPP Media in Australia.