The startup that decided television ads should behave like everything else in marketing - trackable, affordable, and open to anyone with $50 and an idea.
It is a Tuesday afternoon in 2026, and somewhere a two-person skincare brand is buying a television commercial. Not on a network. Not through an agency lunch. From a dashboard, between meetings, with a budget smaller than the catering bill of a single Super Bowl spot. The ad will run during streaming shows tonight, and by Thursday the founder will know - to the dollar - whether it worked. That ordinary moment is the whole point of Vibe.co.
For most of television's life, this scene was impossible. TV was the cathedral of advertising: expensive, opaque, and gated by people who measured success in gross rating points rather than sales. Vibe.co's argument is almost rude in its simplicity. The cathedral, they say, should be a self-checkout.
"Roughly 90% of advertisers on Vibe are running TV ads for the first time."
- THE CASE FOR A SELF-CHECKOUT CATHEDRALDigital advertising spent two decades teaching marketers to expect a number for everything. Click, cost, conversion, return. Then those same marketers turned to television and found a fog machine. You bought reach, you crossed your fingers, and you read a report weeks later written in a language designed to be impressive rather than useful.
Connected TV - the streaming apps that quietly replaced cable - should have fixed this. The pipes were digital. The data existed. But the buying experience stayed stuck in the old world: minimum spends, sales calls, and dashboards that treated a corner store like it was Procter & Gamble. The technology had moved on. The on-ramp had not.
"TV had become digital everywhere except the part where you actually buy it."
- THE FOG MACHINE PROBLEMSo the question Vibe.co set out to answer was not "how do we make better TV ads." It was quieter and harder: why can't buying a TV ad feel like buying a Facebook ad? Same precision, same speed, same merciless honesty about what it returned.
Vibe.co is run by people allergic to starting from zero. Arthur Querou, the CEO, is a serial ad-tech entrepreneur with four exits behind him and a stint at Y Combinator where Sam Altman was his mentor. His co-founder and CTO, Franck Tetzlaff, built KMTX - a French leader in semantic targeting - alongside him and sold it to Seedtag in 2022. They are, in the most literal sense, repeat offenders in the business of advertising plumbing.
Their bet was specific. Not that TV would get bigger, but that TV would get accountable - and that the company providing the scoreboard would own the next decade of ad spend. Querou likes to frame the ambition without much modesty: he wants to build "the Meta for TV ads." It is the kind of line that sounds like hype until you notice the platform is structured exactly like that - self-serve, AI-driven, ruthlessly measured.
"The performance TV advertising market is on track to surpass social media advertising by 2035."
- ARTHUR QUEROU, CO-FOUNDER & CEOThe platform collapses the entire television ad pipeline into one self-serve workflow. You write or generate the creative, pick an audience from millions of consumer profiles, buy across 500+ apps and channels, and then watch the results land - not in gross rating points, but in revenue. Campaigns start at $50 a day, which is roughly the budget that used to get you laughed out of a media-buying meeting.
What makes the whole thing tick is the refusal to outsource any step to a phone call. A founder who has never produced a video can describe a product to Vibe Studio and get something airable. A marketer who has never negotiated inventory can let the AI Assistant route the spend. The platform is not trying to make you a television expert. It is trying to make television expertise unnecessary - which is a far more disruptive ambition, and a slightly terrifying one if you happen to be a media-buying agency.
AI generates TV-ready video ads, so a brand without a production budget can still look like it has one.
The IQ2 engine recommends strategy, targets audiences, and automates the media buying you used to need an agency for.
Millions of consumer profiles let a local shop aim with the precision of a national giant.
Measurement that reports true revenue lift - the rare ad metric that answers "did this actually cause a sale?"
"The same precision marketers expect from digital, pointed at the biggest screen in the house."
- WHAT THE DASHBOARD ACTUALLY DOESQuerou and Tetzlaff exit their semantic-targeting company - and immediately start the next one.
New York headquarters, one stubborn thesis: TV should work like a performance channel.
Thousands of brands - most of them first-time TV advertisers - start buying streaming ads directly.
Less than two years in, revenue hits a nine-figure run rate.
Led by Hedosophia. Carolyn Everson and Nextdoor's Nirav Tolia join the board.
A platform that promises measurement had better measure well, or the whole pitch collapses. Vibe's customers tend to talk in return-on-ad-spend, the metric that is hard to fake because it either bought something or it didn't.
The September 2025 Series B was led by Hedosophia, an early backer of Spotify, Uber and Airbnb, with returning investors Elaia and Singular and a guest list that reads like a strategy hire: Revolut's Nik Storonsky, Supercell's Ilkka Paananen, and advertising veteran Carolyn Everson. Vibe describes itself, with some justification, as the most-used CTV ad-buying platform in the US.
"$100 million in revenue, 5,000 brands, two years. The fog machine, it turns out, was optional."
- THE PROOF, SUMMARIZEDStrip away the funding headlines and Vibe's mission is unfashionably plain: rebuild television's advertising infrastructure so any brand can use it, not just the Fortune 500. For decades, the big screen was a status symbol you had to qualify for. Vibe's whole existence is a bet that the qualification was always artificial - a side effect of bad tooling, not a law of nature.
It shows up in the small choices. The $50 minimum. The AI that writes a passable ad for a founder who has never opened video editing software. The measurement that treats a regional pet brand with the same rigor as a national one. Each is a quiet vote against the idea that television belongs to whoever can afford the velvet rope.
"We want Vibe to be the default way brands advertise on TV."
- ARTHUR QUEROUVibe is wagering that performance TV eventually outgrows social advertising - Querou pegs the crossover at 2035. That is a long horizon, and skeptics are right to note that ambitious founders rarely forecast their own irrelevance. But the direction is hard to argue with: ad budgets follow measurement, measurement is now possible on TV, and the company building the meter has a head start.
There is a catch worth naming. Roughly 10% of ads on the platform are already AI-generated, with the company expecting 30% by 2026. A world where the machine writes the ad, picks the audience, and grades its own homework is efficient. Whether it is good for the ads themselves is a question Vibe will spend the next decade answering, like it or not.
The competitive map is also getting crowded. The Trade Desk, Roku, Amazon, and a wave of performance-CTV upstarts all want the same budgets, and most of them have either deeper pockets or more inventory. Vibe's defense is the on-ramp - the unglamorous fact that it is simply easier to start. In a market where 90% of its advertisers had never bought a TV ad before, the company that owns the first dollar tends to own the hundredth. Whether that lead holds as giants copy the self-serve playbook is the open question hanging over the next funding round.
Back to that Tuesday afternoon. The two-person skincare brand checks the dashboard on Thursday. The number is there - revenue, not impressions, not vibes. A few years ago that founder could not have bought the ad at all, let alone known if it worked. Vibe.co did not make television cheaper to watch. It made it possible to keep score. And once you can keep score, everyone wants to play.
"They did not reinvent the commercial. They handed out the remote."
- CLOSING ARGUMENT