Celebrating Global Entrepreneurship Week: Spotlight on Technology Founders That Successfully Exited
This Global Entrepreneurship Week, we’re celebrating a handful of brilliant technology founders with significant exits who we’ve had the privilege to work with.
We support many incredible entrepreneurs at every stage, and while this piece focuses on some of those that sold their companies, our admiration extends far beyond this list.
From tech and data, to embedded insurance and mobility, these founders share a common thread: they’ve built businesses that didn’t previously exist and then steered them all the way to scale, transformation, and, in many cases, a successful sale.
Gilles Chetelat & Hervé Brunet
Visionaries who helped define European ad tech (StickyADS.tv) 
We’re starting with Gilles Chetelat and Hervé Brunet because their story of innovation and success is close to GingerMay’s heart.
We were privileged to work with Gilles and Hervé in GingerMay’s early days to grow their UK and European presence. The business scaled quickly and their success was rewarded with a spectacular 2016 acquisition by Comcast, an incredible achievement for a largely bootstrapped business.
As co-founders of StickyADS.tv, Gilles and Hervé built one of Europe’s first and most successful programmatic video SSPs, empowering broadcasters and premium publishers to take control of their video advertising.
Today, they’re continuing to shape the ecosystem with the same brilliance and ambition they showed from the start. Gilles now leads mediarithmics, a data collaboration and retail media platform redefining first-party data strategy for European media owners. Hervé, meanwhile, is CEO of Pubstack, driving innovation for publishers looking to maximise yield and transparency.
Their paths are a masterclass in staying true to your principles while continuing to reinvent the playbook. We couldn’t be prouder to have witnessed a small part of their journey.
Lauren Wetzel
Driving privacy-first data collaboration (InfoSum)
Lauren Wetzel, CEO/Board Director at InfoSum, steered the privacy-first data collaboration technology towards a major strategic acquisition by WPP (via its media investment arm GroupM) in April 2025.
Founded in 2015, InfoSum enables brands, media owners, and tech partners to connect data sources across the marketing ecosystem without requiring data movement or exposure, using federated learning and privacy-enhancing technologies.
With the acquisition, WPP described InfoSum’s technology as a key building block for its AI-led data offering, integrated into its “Intelligence Beyond Identity” strategy.
Lauren’s leadership is notable for reframing how data collaboration works; her view that “you never move data, you never lose control and yet, you still unlock real insight and performance” signals how deeply she thinks about the privacy-performance trade-off.
We admire Lauren for tackling one of the most complex architectural and regulatory problems in the ad-tech/data space, and for achieving a significant exit that validates the importance of that infrastructure.
Jürgen Galler
Data, privacy and a strategic exit to TripleLift (1plusX)
Jürgen Galler is co-founder and CEO of 1plusX, a Swiss data platform focused on privacy-first audience analytics and activation.
1plusX built a sophisticated first-party data management and AI engine that helped publishers and marketers turn their own data into actionable audiences in a post-cookie world. In 2022, TripleLift acquired 1plusX to bring that first-party intelligence directly into its ad platform, a deal reported to be around $150 million and a clear signal of how strategically important Jürgen’s technology had become.
We admire Jürgen for building in one of the hardest spaces – privacy-compliant data – and proving that deep, technical, infrastructure-level innovation can result in a very meaningful exit and a bigger platform for the product to grow on.
Noam Shapira
Solving real-world needs through technology (Setoo, Pattern, Via.ai)
Noam Shapira is an amazing entrepreneur and innovator using technology to solve real-world needs.
With Setoo, he transformed insurance for online travel agents, ticket sellers and e-commerce sites by enabling online businesses to build and distribute innovative insurance products, such as claims-free insurance, tailored to their customers’ needs. When Setoo merged with Pattern (then acquired by Passportcard), he extended that vision into embedded insurance, creating coverage that fits seamlessly within the digital purchase journey.
Now, at Via.ai, Noam is building a travel-agent-as-a-service platform, enabling travel brands and financial institutions to transform customer engagement and increase conversion with their own branded AI travel concierge across channels..
We loved working with Noam and look forward to seeing what he does next – because if his track record is anything to go by, it’ll be both practical and visionary in equal measure.
Andy Monfried
The long game in data (Lotame)
Some founders build to flip. Andy Monfried built Lotame to last.
Andy founded Lotame in 2006, and spent nearly two decades turning it into one of the world’s leading independent data and identity platforms, supporting marketers and publishers across more than 100 countries. Over that time, Lotame evolved from an early DMP to a full end-to-end data collaboration and identity solution, surviving multiple ad-tech hype cycles along the way.
In March 2025, Publicis Groupe announced its agreement to acquire Lotame to bolster its Epsilon-powered identity and data capabilities, effectively bringing one of ad tech’s most durable independents into a major holding company.
We admire Andy for building a truly global data business and proving that patient, compounding execution can lead to a very sizeable exit.
Jonathan Opdyke
Turning retail traffic into a marketplace (HookLogic)
Before “retail media” became the buzzword du jour, Jonathan Opdyke was already there.
As co-founder and CEO of HookLogic, he helped build one of the first platforms to turn retailer websites into media properties where brands could bid for sponsored placements, effectively inventing a chunk of what we now call retail media.
In 2016, Criteo acquired HookLogic in a deal reported at around $250 million, bringing HookLogic’s retailer network and brand relationships into its performance marketing platform. Jonathan joined Criteo as President of Brand Solutions and later became Chief Strategy Officer, shaping the company’s wider commerce marketing vision.
Jonathan’s journey is a standout case study in spotting a structural shift early.
Calum Smeaton
From Edinburgh startup to global TV currency (TVSquared)
Scotland has quietly produced some impressive ad tech success stories and Calum Smeaton is right at the centre of that.
Calum founded TVSquared in Edinburgh to tackle one of TV advertising’s thorniest problems: measuring and attributing outcomes across linear and streaming channels in a consistent, actionable way. TVSquared grew into a global converged-TV measurement and attribution platform, working with advertisers, agencies, and broadcasters around the world.
In February 2022, Innovid announced it would acquire TVSquared in a cash-and-stock deal valued at around $160 million, creating an independent, “currency-grade” standard for cross-platform TV measurement. Innovid itself later agreed to be acquired by Mediaocean in 2024, extending the impact of TVSquared’s technology even further into the ad-buying workflow.
We love Calum’s story because it shows that you can build globally significant measurement technology from outside the traditional ad tech hubs, and that deep, technical products aimed at hard problems absolutely can find big exits.
Continuing the celebration
Global Entrepreneurship Week is about more than celebrating big funding rounds or splashy valuations. The technology founders we’ve mentioned are just a sample of the entrepreneurial talent pushing the boundaries of advertising, data, insurance and mobility. But we’re equally inspired by the many entrepreneurs who are still building their next chapter.