You ever watch someone walk into a broken system and not just fix it, but turn it into a machine that hums, scales, and somehow makes everyone else look like they’re stuck in traffic while they’re in a helicopter? That’s Swivel.
Founded in 2023 by Joseph Hirsch, Matt Dearborn, and Rich Lin, the same trio behind SpringServe (which sold to Magnite in 2021), Swivel is what happens when veterans of the adtech grind say, “Yeah, we’re done babysitting line items and reconciling spreadsheets.” The mission? Simple. Automate the chaos of advertising operations so publishers and media teams can finally stop playing Whac-A-Mole and start playing chess.
And it’s not just hype. Swivel just locked in a $5.8M Series A, led by Tribeca Venture Partners and Ardent Venture Partners, with new money from Motley Fool Ventures and continued belief from Roster Capital and Aperiam Ventures. Add that to their $3M seed in 2024, and you’ve got $8.8M in firepower fueling a product that’s already saved clients like LG Ad Solutions over 25,000 hours of ad ops grunt work, 500,000 automated actions that no human ever had to do.
Swivel’s not selling fantasy. They’re selling time. Precision. Headspace. It’s no-code AI automation built by people who’ve carried the pager, cleaned up the mess, and know exactly where the bodies are buried. Think of it as the adtech exoskeleton for ops teams. You don’t need to rip out your stack, they plug into your ad servers, DSPs, SSPs, OMS, whatever acronym you’re wrangling, and get to work.
With Geir Magnusson Jr (ex-AppNexus, fuboTV) as CTO and Frans Vermeulen (ex-FreeWheel, TruOptik) as President, the bench is deep. And this Series A? It’s fuel for scaling the product’s natural-language “autopilots,” AI driven orchestration, and unified analytics. Translation: more brain, less brawn.
They’ve already signed 10 publishers, mostly in the CTV space, proving this isn’t a prototype, it’s a movement. The kind that doesn't knock. It picks the lock, automates the process, and tells you the door was never even necessary.
To the Swivel team, Joe, Matt, Rich, Geir, Frans, this round isn’t just validation. It’s a green light. The industry’s bloated. Ops are broken. And now? The fix is funded.
Let’s connect and keep the momentum going across the tech ecosystem. Whether you’re a founder shaping the future, a leader driving change, a VC backing bold ideas, or an investor spotting the next big thing—together, we’re pushing boundaries. Proud to be building the future with you.
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