ai-advertising
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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.
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.
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.
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.