Following three years of legal warfare with its parent company LG Electronics, Alphonso – LG’s ad tech division – finally has a way out. Actually, it has three potential options.
Alphonso is weighing a traditional IPO (it filed a confidential S-1 in September 2025), a joint venture with Comcast or a billion-dollar private equity deal with the Koch brothers that could make the whole ugly fight moot.
It’s not clear yet which path is Alphonso’s destiny, but one thing is certain: The nature of its relationship with LGE is about to change dramatically. Ashish Chordia, a co-founder of Alphonso and its former CEO, intends to make sure of it. He’s spent the better part of the past three years dragging LGE through courtrooms to get here.
“I don’t give up,” Chordia told AdExchanger. “I’m a dog with a bone – and either something is going to happen, or I keep trying.”
LG Ads declined to comment for this story.
Previously on …
For those who haven’t been binging the latest episodes of “The Bold and the Beautiful,” or simply need a refresher on how it all went sideways, here’s the short version.
LG Electronics acquired a controlling stake in Alphonso in 2021, promising to take it public within five years.
But as revenue grew at Alphonso, which rebranded to LG Ads not long after the deal closed, LGE changed its mind. Leadership orchestrated a boardroom coup on December 16, 2022 – internally referred to it as “Project Wall-E,” a disparaging reference to the Pixar movie about a trash-collecting robot – that involved firing Chordia along with co-founder and former CTO Lampros Kalampoukas and then-CEO Raghu Kodige (also a co-founder).
The aggrieved parties sued twice in Delaware and won both times. They got their board seats reinstated and their IPO rights restored.
Meanwhile, a $4.5 billion damages suit in California is still pending, and a separate Delaware case seeking monetary damages from LGE and its subsidiary Zenith Electronics – the entity through which LGE holds its Alphonso stake – is headed to trial in June. A judge recently dealt LGE a setback in the latter case by ruling that LG’s Korean parent company can be named as a defendant, meaning that any damages could hit LGE’s balance sheet directly rather than being absorbed by a subsidiary.
In short, Chordia said, LGE “has to take this seriously.”
Tender is the offer
But, as the legal battles grind on, three potential resolutions have taken shape and they’re all racing against the same deadline.
The first, a court-mandated tender offer, is currently underway at $118 per share – a valuation Chordia calls “incredibly shitty” – and closes on September 11.
Alphonso still has some work to do before it can go public, including filing an updated S-1 and undergoing an audit by the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board, but Chordia expects the IPO could happen sometime next year.
If LGE decides to be difficult – say, by refusing to support the IPO or taking steps to diminish the company’s value ahead of a public offering – Chordia said he will proceed with a direct listing, a path that doesn’t require LGE’s cooperation or blessing.
Either way, an IPO is the one outcome Chordia says he can guarantee. However, once the tender offer closes and LGE consolidates its stake, the calculus changes for anyone else at the table.
In other words, with September 11 fast approaching, the clock is ticking on Alphonso’s other two options.
The Comcast deal
The option Chordia says he most wants to happen is a potential deal with Comcast through Atairos, the private investment firm in which Comcast is the largest investor and which was the fund behind Alphonso’s original negotiations with LG.
The two sides were in discussions for months, but momentum stalled earlier this year – something that makes more sense in retrospect, Chordia said, given that Comcast has been consumed by its planned split from NBCUniversal.
But there has been some forward motion. Chordia was in Philadelphia at Comcast’s headquarters as recently as two and a half weeks ago to meet with the executive team, and he’s cautiously optimistic that the deal will come together, in part because of a fortuitous personnel change. The new CEO of Comcast – once the spinoff is complete – will be Michael Angelakis, who, as the former CEO of Atairos, was the executive who originally approved the LG term sheet.
The rationale for a joint venture between Alphonso/LG Ads and Comcast is straightforward, Chordia said.
“LG has screens and Alphonso has monetization, but what the entire thing lacks is content,” he said. A strategic partnership with Comcast could help fill that gap. Even post-spinoff, the new Comcast would bring Xumo, its free streaming platform, and FreeWheel, its video ad tech business – assets that would amplify what Alphonso already does.
A Comcast joint venture is Chordia’s preferred option of the three, but he doesn’t expect significant movement until January or February at the earliest.
The PE deal
While that deal simmers, Chordia has another iron in the fire – and this one could move faster.
On August 5, Koch Equity Development submitted a $1 billion nonbinding letter of intent to Michael Hudes, the CEO of LG Ads, a copy of which was reviewed by AdExchanger. Koch’s interest, per the letter, is in Alphonso’s growth relative to its peers and its potential as a public company.
The proposal, which prices Alphonso at roughly $200 a share – significantly more than the current tender offer price of $118 – would involve Koch funding a buyout of Alphonso’s minority shareholders, helping LGE consolidate its stake while positioning the company for a future IPO. Conversations between the two sides began in late July.
The deal would resolve the core disputes with LGE, including fixing Alphonso’s contentious transfer pricing arrangement, buying out minority shareholders at “closer to a fair price,” Chordia said, and clearing the way for new long-term commercial agreements.
But for Chordia, the Koch offer serves another purpose, too. He isn’t shy about using it as leverage to goose Comcast. “If they get there sooner,” he said, “it’s just more pressure for other people.”
What the numbers say
So what makes Alphonso worth fighting over? The numbers tell a story, Chordia said.
The company is growing roughly 50% year over year, with LGE’s official projection at $850 million in revenue this year, although Chordia believes that’s too cautious.
“Management is always conservative – I project $1 billion,” he said. “I could be wrong, but I don’t think I am. It’s within striking distance.”
According to Chordia, that growth has come without a proportional increase in headcount. A team of around 100 people – roughly the same size as four years ago, when revenue was $250 million – is now supporting a business approaching more than three times that amount.
“Our people growth is linear,” Chordia said, “but our ad revenue growth is exponential.”
Chordia has been making this prediction since 2012, the year Alphonso launched. At the time, multiple investors laughed him out of the room, he said, when he told them he wanted to build a billion-dollar revenue company.
“So this feels almost like a victory lap,” Chordia said.
He probably just didn’t expect to run it through so many courtrooms.
