Privacy terror to adtech: SilverPush’s rise from the ashes

Four years ago, Hitesh Chawla’s Gurugram-based tech startup made headlines across the world for helping advertisers embed ultrasonic tracking beacons in TV signals. Revenue collapsed, a co-founder quit, and vultures circled. In a bind, Chawla turned to a new business: matching digital ads to television—in real time—and today claims over 100 clients from Unilever to Nestle to Spotify

SilverPush now tracks hundreds of TV channels, with proprietary machine learning systems that can detect advertisements in real time

Chawla claims revenue more than doubled in 2018, and SilverPush announced just last month that it had raised $5 million in Series B funding

In patent filings published in December, it claims that it can identify a live TV ad in under a second, and then trigger related ads across digital media for its clients

SilverPush also helps brands run contextual ads with online videos, attracting a roster of global and Indian companies, as well as politicians readying for elections

Could I have seen the adverts?

“You could have, you could have,” says Hitesh Chawla.

What are those brands, if you could name them?

In his dimly lit glass cabin on the third floor of a mall in Gurugram, Chawla, co-founder of SilverPush, a company which sells technology solutions to target consumers with ads across television and digital media, hesitates slightly. “I am not sure if I should share names.”

“I can tell you one,” he then continues. “They were a large e-commerce company called Askme.com.

AUTHOR

Virat Markandeya

Virat Markandeya is an independent journalist based in Delhi. He has written on science and technology for publications like IEEE Spectrum, Nautilus and the Nature Publishing Group. He is most inspired while hearing the clangs of history in academic papers. His motto is Pauca Sed Matura and he tweets at @viratmarkandeya.

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