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Alex Song
He spent nine years reading markets for Goldman and Bill Ackman. Now he is handing small brands the data science that used to belong only to the giants.
MacCoy Merkley
MacCoy Merkley is the Chief Marketing Officer of Portland Leather Goods, the largest leather bag manufacturer in North America. A former wedding photographer, he answered a Craigslist ad for a digital media specialist in 2018 and went on to help scale the company from roughly $3.5M to more than $100M in annual revenue. He is known in direct-to-consumer circles for a product-first, no-nonsense approach to marketing, heavy use of Meta advertising, strategic discounting, and a very active personal presence on LinkedIn and X.
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.
SelfMade
SelfMade is a New York-based AI creative company behind Skipper, a creative intelligence platform that scrapes customer reviews, Reddit threads, Amazon feedback and social comments to build audience personas and generate on-brand performance ads at scale. Originally founded in 2015 as an Instagram commerce app, the company pivoted through agency work before rebuilding around AI-driven creative production for e-commerce and direct-to-consumer brands.
Jake Vadeboncoeur
Jake Vadeboncoeur is the founder and CEO of MediaGlobe, a Boston-based paid media facilitator that gives serious advertisers whitelisted, enterprise-class ad accounts on Meta, Google, and TikTok. The company positions itself as a partner for high-spend buyers in ecommerce, affiliate marketing, and lead generation, promising lower CPMs and no arbitrary spend caps. A Merrimack College business graduate who cut his teeth in media buying, Vadeboncoeur built MediaGlobe into a venture-backed operation that raised a Series A in 2023 and reports serving well over a thousand clients.
Sinisa Rakovich
Sinisa (Siggi) Rakovich is the founder and CEO of Hunch, a creative performance platform used by paid social teams at global brands and agencies to automate ad creative, media buying, and cross-channel insights across Meta, TikTok, and Snapchat. Split between New York and Belgrade, Hunch was co-founded in 2018 by Rakovich with Igor Simovic and Nikola Milenkovic, a team that had worked together for more than 15 years. Before Hunch, Rakovich founded Building Explorer, a real-estate platform acquired by PBF in 2010. Hunch raised a €4M round led by Catalyst Romania in 2022 and works with more than 100 global brands.
Will Sartorius
Will Sartorius is the CEO of SelfMade, a New York performance marketing company, and the builder behind Skipper, an AI creative intelligence platform. He took over a near-dead agency in 2023 and rebuilt it around a single conviction: the data brands need to make better ads already exists in Amazon reviews, Reddit threads and Facebook comments, waiting to be scraped, tagged and turned into creative. His pitch to marketers is blunt: stop brainstorming, start listening to what customers already said.
Genus AI
Genus AI is a generative-AI marketing platform for direct-to-consumer and e-commerce brands. It turns a product catalog into thousands of on-brand ad creatives, videos, seed audiences and copy, then distributes and optimizes them across Meta, TikTok, Google, Pinterest and other channels. Founded in 2017 by brothers Tadas and Viktoras Jucikas, the company pairs a Nashville headquarters with a machine-learning hub in Vilnius, Lithuania, and generates tens of millions of catalog images and videos each month.
Creatify AI
Creatify AI is a Mountain View startup building an end-to-end AI ad platform that turns a product URL into ready-to-run, UGC-style video ads. Founded by former Meta and Snap AI leaders, it generates scripts, voiceovers, and lifelike avatars, then tests and optimizes ads across TikTok, Meta, YouTube and more. The company crossed $9M in ARR within roughly 18 months and raised a $15.5M Series A in May 2025 co-led by WndrCo and Kindred Ventures.
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.
Scalify
Scalify is an AI-powered ad management and automation platform that lets businesses launch, analyze, optimize, and scale Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and Google ads from a single dashboard. Built originally as a Shopify app for e-commerce and dropshipping store owners, it automates the grunt work of media buying - building hundreds of custom and lookalike audiences in seconds, generating ad creatives and copy with AI, running 24/7 rule-based optimization, and shifting budget toward winning ads - so smaller brands can advertise like they have an in-house agency without the agency price tag.
Masa Shimizu
Masahiro 'Masa' Shimizu is the Founder & CEO of ZEALS Co., Ltd. and Omakase.ai, the Japanese pioneer of Chat Commerce. He started ZEALS as a Meiji University freshman in 2014 with robots and a mission to 'elevate Japan,' pivoted to chatbots within one month of Facebook opening its Messenger API in 2016, built Japan's #1 social chat commerce platform with 300+ employees and $69M+ raised, and is now taking that same hospitality-first philosophy — what he calls 'Omotenashi' — into voice-powered AI agents for global e-commerce through Omakase.ai.