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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.
Firsthand
Firsthand is a New York based AI company building the Brand Agent Platform, a system that lets marketers and publishers deploy their own AI-powered brand representatives to engage consumers in real time across owned sites and paid media. Founded in 2023 by digital advertising veterans behind FreeWheel and AppNexus, Firsthand treats AI as a new communication medium rather than a tool for automating existing marketing. Its Lakebed data and knowledge rights management system lets brands retain ownership and control of their content and data while cooperating with AI. The company raised a $26M Series A in March 2025 led by Radical Ventures.