Frans Vermeulen has spent a quarter century in the labyrinth of ad tech, where everyone talks about efficiency while secretly feeding the chaos. He’s seen empires rise on PowerPoint slides, fortunes lost to bad UX, and more “AI breakthroughs” than a sci-fi convention. After watching an entire industry burn countless hours manually trafficking campaigns, he did the only logical thing: he built the escape hatch.

Vermeulen is the President and Co-Founder of Swivel, a company with a deceptively polite mission—to automate the living daylights out of ad operations. Based in New York, he leads a team that’s taking the grunt work out of advertising, turning the daily grind of clicks, spreadsheets, and compliance checks into something an algorithm can do faster, better, and without complaining about the snacks.

He’s not some hoodie-wearing disruptor chasing valuations. He’s an industry lifer who’s seen too many executives confuse activity with progress. And Swivel, his creation, is basically a love letter to every overworked ad ops manager who ever muttered, “There has to be a better way.”