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Thursday, June 26th, 2025 – 1:02 pm
In the intricate landscape of digital advertising, publisher ad operations teams often face a Herculean task: aggregating and analyzing campaign data from a multitude of disparate ad servers to achieve peak revenue yield. This complex and time-consuming manual process is precisely what Swivel, a burgeoning pub tech SaaS startup, aims to streamline. Leveraging the deep, insider knowledge of individuals who formerly built and managed ad servers, Swivel has introduced an AI-driven yield optimization tool designed to automate and enhance publisher revenue generation.
The company, formerly known as PilotDesk before its rebranding to Swivel in May, is the collective vision of seasoned industry veterans. Joseph Hirsch, Matt Dearborn, and Rich Lin, the co-founders of SpringServe, have joined forces with Frans Vermeulen, a long-standing programmatic startup advisor and former executive at FreeWheel. This formidable team’s collaboration began when Vermeulen joined SpringServe as an advisor in 2020. This period coincided with significant shifts in the ad tech industry; FreeWheel had been acquired by Comcast in 2014, and more recently, SpringServe itself was acquired by Magnite in 2021 for $31 million, a strategic move by Magnite to bolster its Connected TV (CTV) advertising capabilities.
The genesis of Swivel can be traced back to discussions among the founders regarding the potential for a yield optimization technology. Their shared "in the weeds" experience with the inner workings of ad servers provided a unique foundation for identifying unmet needs within the publisher ecosystem. Frans Vermeulen elaborated on these early conversations, noting that the team had long contemplated the prospects for such a solution, drawing directly from their hands-on experience.
However, the immediate post-acquisition period for the SpringServe founders involved a contractual obligation to remain with Magnite for approximately two years. Once this commitment concluded, allowing Hirsch, Dearborn, and Lin to pursue new ventures, the quartet swiftly mobilized to establish Swivel. The startup officially launched last year, marking the culmination of their strategic planning and product development efforts.
Automating the Intricacies of Ad Operations
Swivel’s core proposition is to automate the hundreds of granular, manual adjustments that publisher ad ops teams perform daily across various ad servers. These micro-adjustments, which can include dynamically altering price floors, managing query-per-second (QPS) rates to Supply-Side Platforms (SSPs) and Demand-Side Platforms (DSPs), and optimizing campaign pacing, are crucial for maximizing ad revenue, enhancing campaign performance, and ensuring a seamless on-site user experience.
Vermeulen illustrated the challenge with a practical example: "Consider a publisher with a 10-person ad ops team. There are 1,000 things that I could optimize today, but my team only has the time to do 100 of them," he explained. This necessitates a prioritization strategy, where publishers naturally focus on the 100 optimizations that yield the most immediate revenue. However, this approach inevitably leaves a significant number of potential optimizations—the remaining 900—untouched, often involving smaller campaigns or less critical inventory, simply due to resource constraints.
Swivel’s ambition extends beyond merely automating these individual tasks. The company aims to provide an overarching orchestration layer that synchronizes optimization efforts across a publisher’s entire portfolio of ad servers. This is particularly relevant in today’s fragmented ad tech environment. "Our customers use three to seven, on average, different ad platforms for different use cases," Vermeulen stated. This often means employing separate platforms for display, CTV, and audio advertising, each potentially utilizing a different ad server. While these platforms may have some degree of interoperability, their communication is frequently not seamless, creating data silos and hindering holistic optimization.
Swivel bridges this gap by translating disparate data sets from across these various servers. This unified data view enables more intelligent and effective cross-platform adjustments. The AI-driven system surfaces these optimization opportunities as actionable suggestions, empowering human operators to make the final implementation decisions. This hybrid approach—AI-powered insights combined with human oversight—leverages the strengths of both machine intelligence and expert judgment.
Strong Investor Confidence Fuels Growth
The combination of Swivel’s innovative technology and the pedigree of its leadership team, comprised of former SpringServe and FreeWheel executives, has clearly resonated with ad tech investors. To date, Swivel has successfully secured $8.8 million in funding, comprising a $5.8 million Series A round and an initial $3 million in seed funding.
The company’s impressive investor roster includes prominent venture capital firms such as Tribeca Venture Partners, Ardent Venture Partners, Aperiam Ventures, Roster Capital, and Motley Fool Ventures. Adding further weight to Swivel’s credibility within the industry, Mike Shehan and Steve Swoboda, the co-founders of the influential SSP SpotX, are also among the startup’s seed investors. This level of backing underscores the market’s recognition of the problem Swivel is addressing and its potential to deliver a transformative solution.
Currently, Swivel’s revenue stream is primarily generated through its subscription-based software offering. The company boasts eight publicly traded publishing companies among its 15 total publisher clients. While specific client details are often confidential, Swivel has publicly disclosed LG Ads as a media partner, indicating early success in forging strategic alliances.
Strategic Expansion and a Clear Vision for the Future
Initially focusing on the rapidly growing CTV and streaming publisher segments, Swivel anticipates a significant expansion of its target market in the coming year. Vermeulen indicated that traditional print and web publishers, along with emerging sectors like retail media, digital audio, and out-of-home (OOH) advertising sellers, are now firmly within the company’s strategic radar. This broadening scope reflects the universal challenges publishers face in optimizing ad revenue across diverse platforms and formats.
Swivel’s team currently comprises 20 employees, a number Vermeulen expects to grow rapidly. The immediate hiring focus will be on strengthening product development capabilities and bolstering the go-to-market strategy, with an emphasis on sales and business development. Furthermore, Swivel is prioritizing international expansion, with plans to establish a presence in the UK and European markets to complement its current focus on the United States. This global outreach is slated to commence by next year, signaling Swivel’s ambition to become a dominant player on the international stage.
Intriguingly, when questioned about the possibility of Swivel developing its own ad server, Vermeulen offered a definitive "hard no." This stance might appear counterintuitive, given the founders’ extensive experience in building and operating ad servers. However, Vermeulen articulated a clear strategic rationale: "We’re never going to build an ad server, because [ad servers] are already pretty good at what they do, and they’re already advancing in and of themselves."
Instead, Swivel’s strategic advantage lies in its ability to automate and orchestrate ad operations across these existing, capable ad servers, rather than competing in the infrastructure layer. This positioning also offers a degree of protection against ad server vendors introducing their own AI-driven optimization tools. In fact, Vermeulen suggested that such advancements from ad server providers would be a welcome development.
The key differentiator for Swivel, according to Vermeulen, is its unique ability to foster interoperability. "No one’s going to orchestrate across [platforms]," he stated, emphasizing the fragmentation issue. Swivel is uniquely positioned to encourage competing ad servers to work harmoniously, he added, precisely "because we built them." This insider knowledge and deep understanding of ad server architecture grant Swivel a distinct advantage in developing solutions that can effectively bridge the gaps between different systems, ultimately empowering publishers to unlock their full revenue potential in an increasingly complex digital advertising ecosystem. The company’s trajectory, backed by significant funding and a clear strategic vision, positions it as a noteworthy innovator poised to reshape publisher ad operations.
