AdExchanger has named Nativeads.ai one of “6 (More) AI Startups Worth Watching.” In the piece, reporter Joanna Gerber spoke with six founders building AI for advertising, from creative optimization to custom bidding algorithms, about why they started their companies.
With so many AI startups competing for attention, standing out is hard. For many of these founders, the difference is a personal connection to the problem they’re solving, and a belief that humans should stay in control even as AI systems become more autonomous.
Read the original article on AdExchanger.
Alongside Nativeads.ai, AdExchanger featured five other companies:
Founded by Aubriana Lopez, Eric Shaffer and engineer Sagiv Ben Yakov, Agnitio.ai is an agentic AI platform that connects the separate tools marketers already use. It automates work from audience curation to media allocation and measurement, brings brand data into one place, and works with any LLM.
Co-founded in 2020 by Ali Manning and Adam Heimlich, Chalice builds custom AI models that plug into a brand’s media buys and predict what each impression is worth. It runs more than 20 in-house models across multiple DSPs and social platforms, and has been profitable for two years. Manning, who spent eight years at Google, started it to give advertisers algorithms built on their own first-party data.
Kevin Wassong’s mktg.ai, created in 2023, pulls marketing data from every channel into one performance dashboard. It color-codes creative by results and sends AI-generated alerts, while people still decide which ads run and where budget moves.
Co-founded in 2023 by Lindsay Hong, Eric Walzthöny Kreutzberg and Vitaly Boitelet, and launched through Stagwell’s innovation competition, SmartAssets studies a brand’s past results to find the creative features behind its best ads, then suggests changes for people to review. It switches between several LLMs, including Gemini, based on performance.
Launched in 2019 by Tanuj Joshi, Adam Chandler and Joe Ciaramitaro, Eulerity helps franchises and regional businesses automate local advertising, from ad creation and media planning to measurement and review replies. It became profitable soon after launch, and its mission is to give smaller advertisers a level playing field with big brands.
Large language models are good at spotting patterns, but our CEO and co-founder Al Kallel told AdExchanger they still fall short on “brand essence.” Nativeads.ai is built to close that gap and capture what Al calls a brand’s soul: the right colors, the right product placement, even the right shadows.
Al tries to follow a “regret minimization framework”: when an idea is big enough, take the chance now rather than wonder later what could have been.
As our CEO Al Kallel told AdExchanger:
Thank you to AdExchanger for the feature. We’re just getting started, so stay tuned as we keep helping brands create on-brand ad creative at scale.
