We catch up with CEO Jeremy Fain at the ANA Masters of Marketing Conference in Orlando.
Jeremy Fain
After nearly a decade perfecting its deep-learning technology in the US, Cognitiv is finally looking outward. From January 2026, the New York-based adtech firm will plant its own flag in Europe – a move that says as much about where AI advertising is headed as it does about the company itself.
For Jeremy Fain, the decision isn’t just about new markets, but about timing. “Europe’s been ahead of the curve on contextual and privacy-first thinking for years,” he says. “Now the technology’s caught up.”
The company plans to launch its ContextGPT platform – an AI system that builds real-time contextual segments using natural-language prompts – under its own brand for the first time outside the US. Until now, Cognitiv has operated quietly through partners such as Adform. The shift signals growing confidence that contextual intelligence, not identity-based targeting, will define the next wave of programmatic advertising.
Fain says the timing feels right because Cognitiv finally has both the “heft and the revenue” to scale. After ten years building what he calls a deep-learning “brain” for advertisers, the company is now in a position to deploy real-time infrastructure wherever it’s needed — including new co-located servers in Europe.
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Cognitiv’s story began long before machine learning became marketing’s favorite buzzword. Fain co-founded the company in 2015 with two childhood friends – Marc Hudacsko, now CTO, and Aaron Andalman, a neuroscientist from MIT who pivoted from studying the brain to teaching machines how to think.
“Back then, nobody in adtech was using deep learning,” Fain recalls. “DSPs were still bidding with fixed prices – 10 cents, a dollar, five dollars – without real intelligence. We thought we could predict consumer behavior impression by impression.”
Their original idea was to build custom algorithms from each client’s first-party data and plug them into existing DSPs. But when those platforms couldn’t support Cognitiv’s per-impression decision-making, the team built its own. The result was a deep-learning DSP capable of running multiple algorithms for multiple KPIs simultaneously – a kind of high-speed trading engine for marketing outcomes.
Today, Cognitiv describes itself as “the brain behind the brands.” Its core pitch is flexibility: instead of cookie-based audiences, every client gets a model trained to their own data and goals. The company’s ContextGPT product lets marketers generate contextual segments on demand using simple prompts – “find Gen Z music fans who go to concerts” – and see new pages appear in the segment within minutes of publication.
That speed, Fain argues, is critical. “25% of all online content is published that day. If you’re a day behind, you’ve already missed a quarter of the web.”
This real-time approach also distinguishes Cognitiv from rivals such as Seedtag and GumGum. Where others are locked into specific inventory, Cognitiv acts more like a data and decision layer – an AI brain that can plug into any environment.
Fain has a slightly different perspective on the AI boom sweeping marketing. “Everyone thinks AI means a chatbot,” he says. “But advertising happens in milliseconds. We work at the foundation level, with smaller, faster models built for real-time decisions. That’s a different kind of intelligence.”
He sees Cognitiv’s edge not in novelty but in performance – applying deep learning where milliseconds matter, not minutes. “Anyone can plan CTV reach,” he says. “Optimizing to a KPI – that’s where the hard work is.”
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For Cognitiv, Europe offers a testbed for that philosophy. With regulators tightening rules around personal data, the region’s advertisers have been forced to think creatively about targeting without IDs. ContextGPT’s focus on understanding language and culture, rather than cookies, plays naturally into that environment.
But there’s also a cultural reason. “European agencies are used to doing more with less,” says Fain. “There’s a growing appetite for automation that handles optimization so planners can focus on strategy. That mindset fits our technology perfectly.”
Cognitiv now employs around 160 people, roughly half of them scientists, and manages nine-figure annual revenues. Beyond advertising, it has begun white-labeling its AI platform for retail media networks and other firms looking to build predictive models from their own first-party data.
The upcoming European launch won’t just expand the company’s footprint; it will test whether deep learning can finally deliver on digital marketing’s oldest promise – showing the right message to the right person in the right place, without knowing exactly who that person is.
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