demand-side-platform
(24)
AppSamurai and the art of buying a second visit
An install is easy to count. A player who returns is harder to buy. AppSamurai builds mobile growth campaigns around the difference.
Beeswax let advertisers bring their own brains
Most ad platforms sell you their judgment. Beeswax rented out the machinery and let buyers supply their own - a distinction that carried a New York startup into Comcast’s television business.
Vistar Media taught the billboard to wait for rain
A cold day in Salt Lake City becomes an invitation to Hawaii. Behind that small act of persuasion sits Vistar Media’s larger business: making outdoor advertising easier to buy, sell and run.
ZypMedia and the Value of Knowing the Local Salesman
Streaming scattered the television audience. ZypMedia made a business of helping the people who already sold local ads follow it.
C1X and the Price of a Promise
A Silicon Valley ad exchange built a business around a deceptively hard question: can a buyer reserve a real audience, on a real publisher, without losing the plot in the machinery between them?
Admixer wants you to run your own ad business
The company that began by selling ads on Ukrainian websites now sells the machinery behind the market. Its pitch to agencies and publishers: keep more control over the audience, the auction and the money.
Infillion Bought Ad Tech’s Wreckage. Now It Wants to Be the Operating System for Every Ad.
A social-good startup became an ad company, survived Disney, bought MediaMath out of bankruptcy for $22 million and rebuilt nine pieces of ad tech into one modular machine. With Catalina now inside, Infillion is trying to connect the ad you saw to the cereal you actually bought.
He Drove Uber to Keep JamLoop Alive. Now It Wants to Make TV Ads Behave Like Search.
JamLoop survived a broad first act, a bootstrapped near-death stretch and an industry addicted to fuzzy metrics. Its second act is a sharper bet: sell local advertisers the reach of television, the controls of digital and proof that reaches beyond a click.
RZR Is Betting the Next Great Mobile Ad Won't Stay on Your Phone
After 16 years as Aarki, the mobile ad veteran changed its name and widened its field of view. Its new pitch is simple: one learning system should follow performance from the first TV impression to the returning app customer.
Viant Survived Myspace. Now It Wants to Prove Your TV Ad Was Actually Watched
The 27-year-old adtech company outlived the portal era, bought and carried Myspace, and emerged with a sharper bet: connected-TV ads should be addressable, explainable, and measured by more than a play button.
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.
illumin Bet Its Company on a Canvas - Now Marketers Can See Where the Money Leaks
The Toronto ad-tech firm renamed itself after its biggest product bet: a visual map of the customer journey. After a bruising transition, the numbers are moving again - and the most useful lesson is not about AI, but when to change the plan.
The Adtech Rivalry Hiding in the Fee Model
The Trade Desk and Criteo both help marketers buy ads, but their contracts point in different directions. One earns from buyer spend; the other also helps retailers sell inventory, creating an incentive tension worth understanding.
StackAdapt
StackAdapt spent a decade turning the demand-side platform into something closer to a marketing control room. Its bet is that the next advantage in advertising will come from connecting the channels marketers already use - and making the machinery easier to operate.
The Trade Desk
The Trade Desk built a $2.9 billion business by making one unusual promise: it would help advertisers buy media without owning the media itself. Now its AI, identity tools and TV ambitions are testing how far neutrality can scale.
Nexxen
Nexxen is betting that the best way through advertising's maze of screens, signals and middlemen is to own the road from audience discovery to the final impression. Its challenge is turning that unusually complete stack into a simpler choice for buyers and publishers.
RevX
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.
Basis Technologies
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.
InMobi
InMobi is a global mobile advertising and marketing technology company founded in 2007 in Bangalore, India. It became India's first unicorn in 2011 and runs a stack of mobile-first products - the InMobi DSP, InMobi Exchange, and the consumer lockscreen and AI commerce platform Glance - reaching billions of devices and processing over a trillion ad requests monthly. In 2025 it doubled down on artificial intelligence, launching its Helix AI layer and Glance AI commerce, while preparing for a planned domestic IPO in India.
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.
Simpli.fi
Simpli.fi is a Fort Worth, Texas-based advertising technology company that built one of the industry's leading programmatic demand-side platforms (DSP) on unstructured data rather than pre-packaged audience segments. Its Advertising Success Platform combines programmatic media buying - across connected TV, mobile, display, video, native and audio - with agency management and workflow software used by more than 2,000 media teams, agencies and brands. Backed by Blackstone and GTCR at a $1.5 billion valuation, the company specializes in granular, localized, addressable targeting at scale.
Cali Tran
Cali Tran is CEO of Simpli.fi, a programmatic advertising platform backed by Blackstone and GTCR that runs 140,000+ ad campaigns monthly for 40,000 advertisers. Born in a Vietnamese refugee camp at Camp Pendleton and raised as the youngest of six in a family restaurant, he built a career spanning investment banking, venture capital, startup co-founding, and C-suite leadership at Ancestry, Valassis, Centerfield, Brandwatch, and Cision. At Valassis, he engineered a 5x expansion of digital revenue for a $2 billion company. He is an advisor at SignalFire, a board member of OneVietnamNetwork, and a Bowdoin College alumni council member who graduated cum laude in History before earning his MBA from Harvard Business School.
Moloco
Moloco is a Redwood City-based machine learning company that helps app developers, retailers, and streaming platforms turn their first-party data into performance advertising. Its DSP, Commerce Media, and Streaming Monetization products use deep neural networks to make billions of bidding decisions every day for customers like Wayfair, StockX, Costco, Netmarble, and Yogiyo.
Ikkjin Ahn
Ikkjin Ahn is the co-founder and CEO of Moloco, the machine learning-powered advertising platform he built from scratch after spotting a gap at Google: 90% of apps in the Play Store weren't making money. Armed with insights from building YouTube's monetization engine, he launched Moloco in 2013 to democratize access to the kind of AI that only tech giants could afford. Thirteen years later, the company is a $1.5B+ unicorn with 700+ employees across 12 offices, over $200M in annual revenue, and profitable for five consecutive years - a rare combination in Silicon Valley. As of early 2026, Moloco is weighing an IPO.