freewheel
(3)
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.
Diane Yu
Diane Yu is the co-founder and CEO of Tidalwave, a New York-based agentic AI mortgage startup whose SOLO platform aims to modernize mortgage origination with transparency, speed, and lower costs for lenders and borrowers. A career engineer and repeat founder, she previously co-founded the adtech company FreeWheel (acquired by Comcast for roughly $375-400M in 2014), served as CTO of Comcast Advertising and of the digital lender Better, and spent nearly a decade at DoubleClick rising to VP of Engineering. In November 2025 Tidalwave raised a $22M Series A led by Permanent Capital with participation from homebuilder D.R. Horton, and the company was named to the 2026 CB Insights AI 100.
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.