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.”

Before he started Swivel, Vermeulen collected experiences the way most people collect bad passwords.

He was there at DoubleClick, before it got swallowed by Google and turned into the backbone of modern digital ads. He was at FreeWheel, back when people were still pretending TV and digital were different things. He ran strategy at Tru Optik, which TransUnion acquired for its audience data capabilities. And he did a stint at Comcast, learning exactly how the biggest players move when they want to look innovative without actually risking anything.

Along the way, he quietly invested in and advised a handful of future success stories—OpenSlate, IRIS.TV, SpringServe—each of which got acquired by bigger fish. The man has a Midas touch, but without the delusion. What he builds or backs usually ends up in someone else’s portfolio, and yet his fingerprints are all over ad tech’s evolution.

He’s not the loudest voice in the room; he’s the one fixing the system the loud voices broke.

Swivel started as PilotDesk, a platform built to make ad operations less miserable. Then in 2024, it rebranded, leveled up, and set its sights on a bigger mission: to eliminate the ad ops bottleneck entirely.
Not just in CTV and streaming, but across every channel—web, retail media, audio, out-of-home, even print.

The result? A no-code AI platform that runs campaigns like a well-trained orchestra conductor—automating trafficking, optimization, pricing, analytics, and compliance without human panic or endless Slack threads.

Swivel doesn’t dabble in automation; it lives there. Its system performs tens of thousands of micro-adjustments daily—a kind of digital metabolism that keeps campaigns alive and efficient. Instead of relying on people to toggle settings and pray, Swivel’s AI moves budgets, tests strategies, and fixes errors before they become problems. It’s not flashy. It’s just relentless.

In a world where “AI” usually means “a sales deck with a chatbot,” Swivel’s tech actually does something. And it does it for companies like LG Ad Solutions and Telly, where it automated over 30,000 operational tasks and reclaimed 25,000 hours of productivity.

You can almost hear the collective sigh of relief from media teams everywhere.

Vermeulen isn’t trying to replace humans; he’s trying to give them their time back.
He believes AI should run the workflows, not the people. His version of automation isn’t some dystopian replacement—it’s a structural upgrade.

Where others preach AI like a religion, Vermeulen treats it like infrastructure: unseen, reliable, and absolutely essential. His philosophy could be summed up as: humans handle strategy, machines handle suffering.

At Swivel, that means AI agents making thousands of small, smart decisions—pricing, pacing, optimization, reporting—so that people can focus on bigger questions, like how to actually grow revenue.

It’s not sexy. It’s sanity.

Swivel has raised $8.8 million so far—not a vanity round, not hype money. Real, targeted capital to expand its engineering team, scale its go-to-market muscle, and grow into the UK and European markets, where the appetite for automation is catching up to the chaos.

Vermeulen’s team is composed of ad ops veterans and data scientists who’ve seen every inefficiency firsthand. Their collective mission is to stop agencies and publishers from reinventing the wheel every quarter and pretending it’s progress.

Swivel’s platform sits between all the fragmented systems in modern media—the SSPs, DSPs, ad servers, data tools—and orchestrates them like one unified brain. It’s what you’d get if Zapier, DoubleClick, and NASA mission control had a kid.

Vermeulen earned a BA from Boston College and an MBA from NYU Stern, speaks fluent Dutch, and has worked on both sides of the Atlantic.
He’s not a theorist; he’s a practitioner who understands how ideas die in translation between product, sales, and engineering.

His calm, pragmatic leadership style is the antidote to Silicon Valley’s performative optimism. He doesn’t promise the moon. He just automates the rocket fuel.

While others are still talking about the “future of AI in advertising,” Vermeulen’s already living in it.
He’s built a system that’s not aspirational—it’s operational. Swivel is the missing link between human strategy and machine precision, the connective tissue holding together an industry obsessed with fragmentation.

The irony? He’s been at this long enough to know that innovation in ad tech rarely comes from the loudest visionaries. It comes from people like him—seasoned, slightly cynical, allergic to inefficiency, and absolutely unwilling to accept that “this is just how it’s done.”

Frans Vermeulen didn’t disrupt ad tech.
He just made it make sense.