Publisher ad ops teams often must wrangle campaign data from multiple different ad servers to get the maximum ad revenue yield.
The pub tech SaaS startup Swivel wants to make that process much less manual and time-consuming with an AI-driven yield optimization tool designed by people who used to build ad servers.
The company – known as PilotDesk before rebranding to Swivel in May – is the brainchild of SpringServe co-founders Joseph Hirsch, Matt Dearborn and Rich Lin, as well as Frans Vermeulen, a longtime programmatic startup advisor and former executive at FreeWheel. The four connected when Vermeulen joined SpringServe as an advisor in 2020, after FreeWheel was acquired by Comcast in 2014 but just before SpringServe was acquired by Magnite in 2021.
Prior to launching Swivel, the group had discussed the prospects for a yield optimization technology drawing on their “in the weeds” experience with ad servers, Vermeulen told AdExchanger.
But, as part of SpringServe/Magnite deal, the SpringServe founders were required to remain at Magnite for about two years post-acquisition, he said. Once Hirsch, Dearborn and Lin were free to move on from Magnite, the four quickly got to work on building their new startup, which officially launched last year.
Automating operations
Swivel’s pitch is to automate the hundreds of manual micro adjustments that publisher ad ops teams make every day across a number of different ad servers, such as changing price floors in real time or managing the number of queries per second sent to SSPs and DSPs. These tweaks help publishers maximize ad revenue yield, optimize campaign performance and improve the on-site experience.
Consider a publisher with a 10-person ad ops team, Vermeulen said. “There’s 1,000 things that I could optimize today, but my team only has the time to do 100 of them,” he said. So, naturally, publishers will default to optimizing the 100 things that drive the most revenue. But, he added, “that leaves 900 things that I’d love to get to, but they’re smaller campaigns or less important for whatever reason.”
Swivel doesn’t just want to automate those individual processes, Vermeulen said. It also wants to orchestrate the publisher’s optimization across numerous ad servers.
“Our customers use three to seven, on average, different ad platforms for different use cases,” he said. They might use separate platforms for display, CTV and audio ads – each with a different ad server. All of these platforms “kind of talk to each other, but not really,” he said.
Swivel helps translate those disparate data sets across servers, and thus can enable better cross-platform adjustments, Vermeulen said. The AI surfaces these adjustments as suggestions, he added; it’s still up to a human to implement them.
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The solution – plus the leadership of the former SpringServe and FreeWheel execs – seems to have gained traction with ad tech investors. To date, Swivel has raised $8.8 million, including a $5.8 million Series A and $3 million in seed funding.
Swivel’s investors include investment firms Tribeca Venture Partners, Ardent Venture Partners, Aperiam Ventures, Roster Capital and Motley Fool Ventures. Mike Shehan and Steve Swoboda – co-founders of the SSP SpotX – are also among Swivel’s seed investors.
Right now, Vermeulen said, the company’s revenue is primarily from subscription software. He said Swivel has eight publicly traded publishing companies on its client roster, which includes 15 publishers total. Although, as of this writing, the only media partner it could disclose is LG Ads.
Growth plans
Although Swivel started out by courting CTV and streaming publishers, Vermeulen said, he anticipates that the company’s focus will “expand dramatically” by next year. Traditional print and web publishers, as well as retail media, digital audio and out-of-home sellers, are all on the radar, he said.
Swivel has 20 employees, but “that’s growing quickly,” Vermeulen said. For now, hiring will be focused on product development and go-to-market strategy and sales. Expansion into the UK and European markets – to supplement the company’s current focus on the US – will also be a priority by next year, he added.
But when asked if Swivel plans to launch its own ad server, Vermeulen responded that it was a “hard no.”
That might seem counterintuitive, given the founders’ extensive ad server experience.
However, “we’re never going to build an ad server,” Vermeulen said, “because [ad servers] are already pretty good at what they do, and they’re already advancing in and of themselves.”
Instead, Swivel sees opportunity in automating the ad ops tasks across those ad servers, rather than in building its own, Vermeulen said. And, he said, doing so should protect Swivel’s business from ad servers introducing their own AI-based optimization tools – which, by the way, he recommends they do.
“No one’s going to orchestrate across [platforms],” he said. Plus, Swivel is best positioned to get competing ad servers to work together, he added, “because we built them.”
