ai-advertising
(25)
Smartly Makes Ad Operations Less of a Circus
Smartly turns product feeds, media budgets, and a small army of ad variants into one coordinated workflow. The payoff is speed and control, provided your campaign volume can justify an enterprise contract.
Arthur Leopold Is Teaching Advertising to Follow the Crowd
He learned early that attention moves faster than institutions. Now the former Cameo president is building Agentio to help advertising money catch up with the creators who already have the crowd.
Cognitiv Bet on Deep Learning Before It Was Cool - Now It Wants to Kill the Static Audience
Three fifth-grade friends built a neural-network ad company in 2015, when the pitch still needed explaining. A decade later, Cognitiv is turning campaign briefs into live media decisions - and testing whether marketers will trade static segments for models that keep changing their minds.
Icon
Icon is a New York startup that launched in 2024 as 'the world's first AI Admaker' - software pitched as ChatGPT plus CapCut for churning out short-form video ads in minutes. Founded by serial entrepreneur Kennan Davison (aka Kennan Frost) and backed by a $9.2M seed round led by Peter Thiel's Founders Fund, Icon paid a reported $12M for the icon.com domain and drew backing from OpenAI, Cognition and Pika executives plus celebrity angels. After users complained the fully-automated product fell short, the company pivoted toward human-filmed UGC ads (six ads for $999) branded 'The Human Admaker,' before reports in early 2026 said it had gone quiet.
Perion Network
The Israeli adtech company spent a decade buying its way across every screen. Now, after Microsoft pulled the rug on its search business, Perion is betting the whole company on one AI platform - and on the screens Google can't own.
Decide
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.
Evocalize
Evocalize is a Seattle-based marketing technology company that builds a collaborative, AI-powered platform enabling local businesses - especially real estate agents and mortgage loan officers - to launch and optimize sophisticated digital advertising campaigns across Google, Meta, TikTok, YouTube and direct mail with push-button templates. Its software is typically embedded within the tools of enterprise partners such as Realtor.com, Rate and MoxiWorks, and it operates a patented Digital Co-Marketing Network that lets agents and lenders run compliant, cost-shared campaigns together.
Hunch
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.
Jeffrey Matisoff
Jeffrey Matisoff is North America CEO and Managing Partner of The Brandtech Group, the self-described world's number one generative AI marketing company. Named to the regional CEO role in early 2026, he runs Brandtech's largest market and leads its pitch to help brands turn AI into a competitive advantage through tools like the Pencil Gen AI platform and its 'Share of Model' work on how large language models describe brands. Matisoff joined Brandtech in 2021 from WPP, where he was global president of EightBar, IBM's dedicated agency, and he helped lead the acquisition and integration of digital marketing company Jellyfish. His career spans two decades in media and creative, with earlier stops at Accuen, PHD, and Universal McCann.
Omneky
Omneky is a San Francisco generative-AI platform that automatically produces, tests, and optimizes advertising creative - image, video, and UGC-style spokesperson ads - and launches campaigns across Meta, Google, TikTok, LinkedIn, and Reddit. Founded in 2018 by Hikari Senju, it was one of the earliest movers in applying generative AI to advertising, using computer vision and multimodal analysis to predict which creatives will perform and to close the loop between making ads and measuring them. The company has since pivoted toward 'agentic' AI advertising agents that set campaign goals, execute subtasks, and reallocate budget across channels.
Upscale AI
Upscale AI is an AI-native advertising platform that lets performance-driven and e-commerce brands create, run, and optimize TV-quality video ads on streaming and connected TV channels. Its flagship product, Upscale Studio, turns a brand's existing website and social assets into streaming-ready creative, buys media programmatically in real time, and optimizes campaigns for measurable outcomes - bringing the performance-marketing playbook to the living-room screen. Founded by ad-tech veterans from Google, Twitter, Salesforce, Moloco, and MNTN, the company launched out of stealth in May 2025 with $5.5M in funding.
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.
Hikari Senju
Hikari Senju is the founder and CEO of Omneky, a San Francisco generative AI platform that creates, analyzes, and optimizes personalized ad creative at scale. A Harvard computer scientist and son of celebrated Nihonga painter Hiroshi Senju, he began building in generative AI in 2018, five years before ChatGPT made the field mainstream. His mission is to lower the cost of effective advertising so that any founder with a compelling idea can reach customers without a million-dollar budget. Omneky has raised over $13 million from investors including SoftBank and AIX Ventures, and in 2024-2025 Senju pivoted the company toward agentic AI that autonomously plans and runs campaigns across Meta, Google, and TikTok.
Tadas Jucikas
Tadas Jucikas is the founder and CEO of Genus AI, a generative AI platform that produces tens of millions of product images, videos, audiences and ad copy each month for direct-to-consumer and e-commerce brands. He holds a PhD in computational neuroscience from the University of Cambridge, where he decoded the behavior of microscopic worms and published in Nature Methods and PNAS, then spent years applying AI to human behavior for UK government departments and companies like Uber, EDF Energy and Tesco. He co-founded Genus AI with his brother Viktoras, raised $11M in seed capital, and also serves as founding dean at Turing College.
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.
Andrew Kassian
Andrew Kassian is the CEO of Scalify, an AI-powered advertising platform that helps e-commerce brands plan, launch, optimize, and scale paid campaigns across Meta and TikTok from a single dashboard. Scalify's pitch is blunt: you should not need to become a media buyer to run profitable ads. Its tooling generates ad creative from product images, builds lookalike and interest audiences automatically, applies rule-based optimization that pauses losers and scales winners around the clock, and consolidates cross-platform performance data so founders can make spending decisions without exporting spreadsheets. Based in Miami with company operations tied to London, Kassian sits at the intersection of small e-commerce operators and the increasingly automated, AI-driven future of digital advertising.
NewForm
NewForm is a New York-based creative intelligence company that pairs an in-house creative studio with proprietary software called Framework. It makes paid social ads at scale - roughly 2,500 assets a month written, shot, and edited by people - runs them in market, and turns every result into a living map of what works for a brand. Founded by Hamza Alsamraee, Andrew Presser, and Alec Velikanov, NewForm puts strategists, producers, and engineers under one roof to close the gap between creative and media for performance teams.
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.
Quantcast
Quantcast is a San Francisco-based advertising technology company that uses AI and machine learning to help marketers, agencies and publishers plan, buy, optimize and measure campaigns across the open internet. Built around its patented Ara AI engine and a live Audience Graph that processes trillions of signals a day, Quantcast positions itself as a next-generation demand-side platform for a privacy-first, increasingly cookieless web.
Amanda Richman
Amanda Richman is VP of Global Media Sales at Microsoft Advertising, leading a 700+ person omnichannel sales team from New York. A 30-year veteran of media and advertising, she has run agencies including Wavemaker US and Mindshare North America, winning Adweek's U.S. Media Agency of the Year at Wavemaker in 2020. She joined Microsoft in March 2024 to help brands navigate the convergence of generative AI, search, and connected TV advertising.
Danielle McMeekin
Danielle McMeekin is Vice President and Head of Global Media Sales (also titled Head of Global Performance Sales) at Microsoft Advertising, where she leads the company's worldwide media and performance sales strategy. Based in Orlando, Florida, she brings over two decades of experience in digital advertising, having risen through sales leadership roles at Yahoo! before joining Microsoft. A recognized voice on the future of search and AI-powered advertising, she co-authors thought leadership on conversational search, multimodal discovery, and generative AI's transformation of performance marketing. She received Microsoft Advertising's Client Obsession FY25 Award for her work building powerful partnerships with clients and partners.
Kya Sainsbury-Carter
Kya Sainsbury-Carter spent over 20 years at Microsoft, most recently as Corporate Vice President of Microsoft Advertising, where she led a global ads business generating more than $18 billion in annual gross revenue. She oversaw the division's transformation through AI-powered and agentic advertising, expanded retail media, and enterprise partnerships before departing in May 2026 - with LinkedIn's Matt Derella named to succeed her.
Lynne Kjolso
Lynne Kjolso is VP of Global Partner and Retail Media at Microsoft Advertising, where she leads the company's retail media strategy and global partner ecosystem. A philosophy PhD turned digital advertising executive, she has spent over 15 years at Microsoft shaping search, retail, and commerce media. Named to Ad Age's Tech Power List 2024 and The List 2025, she is a leading voice on retail media standardization, gaming as an advertising frontier, and the intersection of AI and commerce.
Vidhya Srinivasan
Vidhya Srinivasan is VP and General Manager of Advertising & Commerce at Google, overseeing a portfolio responsible for over $66 billion in quarterly revenue. A computer science graduate of IIT Madras and Georgia Tech, she spent a decade at IBM and several years at AWS - where she scaled Amazon Redshift into the cloud's fastest-growing data warehouse - before joining Google in 2019. At Google she has spearheaded AI-first advertising products including Performance Max, agentic shopping via Google's Universal Cart, and the integration of Gemini across search and shopping surfaces. She is one of the most consequential voices shaping how AI rewires digital advertising.
Omar Tawakol
Omar Tawakol is a serial entrepreneur and AI advertising pioneer who turned audience data, voice AI, and now spatially-aware AI into three consecutive company exits. He founded BlueKai (acquired by Oracle for $400M+), Voicea (acquired by Cisco), and currently leads Rembrand, an AI-powered virtual product placement platform that embeds brands invisibly into video content. He holds board seats at The Trade Desk and LiveRamp, and in 2025 merged Rembrand with Spaceback to build an AI-powered ad factory that reaches across CTV, digital video, and display.