AdSkate, a Pittsburgh adtech creative-analytics startup born out of Carnegie Mellon and Innovation Works’ AlphaLab, was acquired by Pittsburgh ad agency Brunner in 2026.
A Move Just in Time for Unprecedented Circumstances
Akaash Ramakrishnan spent six and a half years at an advertising agency in Michigan, working on Ford and Lincoln accounts, before he had any inkling of starting a company. Shreyas Venugopalan headed the other direction, finishing a Ph.D. in electrical and computer engineering at Carnegie Mellon University and looking for a way to apply it outside a lab.
Shreyas made a pitch to Akaash that got the company off the ground. “He was the guy who bridged the gap for me to come to Pittsburgh. He said, if you move to Pittsburgh, we can kick off the company and get Carnegie Mellon to support us. One thing led to another. I moved out at the tail end of 2019, and in 2020 we started the company in full swing.” Akaash remembered.
They quickly built a minimum viable product (MVP) and went to market, not knowing what was right around the corner. The early days were spent picking up smaller clients of varying sizes while the founders figured out, in real time, how to sell a product when neither of them had professional sales experience. They knew they needed some help to sharpen their skills and work on their go-to-market plans.
The memory that still stands out for Akaash: three days before COVID-19 shut everything down, he and Shreyas flew to San Francisco believing they’d all but closed a deal with a major ad-tech company. In the elevator on the way up to the meeting, the client told them the conversation wasn’t a product discussion anymore as they weren’t sure they had the budget. The founders flew home the next day feeling quite different than on the way out. They landed and the next day, Shreyas sat down to get back to work and the news broke. Shreyas sent Akaash a screenshot of the headlines that COVID had hit, and the two had to now figure out how to keep the company alive.
The AlphaLab Turning Point
In 2021, AdSkate joined AlphaLab, Innovation Works’ accelerator program. Akaash calls it a turning point on two fronts: learning how to tell the company’s story, and learning the difference between sales and business development. “There’s a fine line between business development and sales. Sales is when you’re doing it from scratch — and especially for most founders, including myself, you don’t know how to sell. You have an idea of a product, you build it, and then you realize the market doesn’t want it, or they want a derivative of it,” Akaash recalled.
AlphaLab pushed AdSkate toward a product philosophy built around what customers actually needed, not what engineers assumed they’d want next. Shreyas credits the experience with a major shift in how they approached things. “We were at the point where the platform does an XYZ function, and we’d think — wouldn’t it be cool to convert that output into another form, do more analysis on it? But you put it in front of the customer, and what they actually want might be a better login experience. Don’t go guessing. Iterate quickly, throw it in front of the customer, get the feedback, and add that to your sprint plan.” The accelerator helped them see it wasn’t all about what they could do; it was about what the customer found valuable.
Call out:
“Don’t go guessing. Iterate quickly, throw it in front of the customer, get the feedback, and add that to your sprint plan.”
— Shreyas Venugopalan, Co-Founder & CTO, AdSkate
The Three W’s: Why AdSkate Pivoted to Creative Analytics
AdSkate’s original product was built on the same logic Google and Facebook built their businesses on: knowing who was seeing an ad. As privacy regulations phased out that kind of tracking, Shreyas describes the industry’s targeting options as three questions — who, where, and what. With the “who” weakening, AdSkate first leaned into “where,” refining its contextual engine to predict which websites and channels an ad should appear on.
Customers gave AdSkate a clear signal that “where” wasn’t the real opportunity. Shreyas explained, “Our customers were telling us — ‘I don’t really care where (the ad) ends up, I have Google and enough knowledge to decide that for myself. You’re giving me an incremental improvement, and maybe that’s not what I want. But if you can tell me what I should put in my ad, that makes a huge difference to me.’” Customers wanted to know which elements in their creative style resonated with which section of the audience. The lightbulb on “what” was super valuable to customers and something they could uniquely provide lit up. They had gone through all three w’s and landed on the “what” for “who”.
That was the pivot: between 2022 and 2023, AdSkate rebuilt its engine around creative analytics, studying the actual content of an ad (the image, the spoken text, the audio) and mapping which combinations of creative elements resonated with which audiences. The underlying computer vision was the same; the target of the analysis moved from the internet’s content to the ad’s own content.
A Pittsburgh Success Story, Twice Over
AdSkate grew its team in Pittsburgh by drawing on the university talent around it. They pushed forward leveraging about six interns between Carnegie Mellon and the University of Pittsburgh over the company’s life, alongside two founders, full-time staff both in and outside the U.S., and a rotating group of contractors. One hire came almost by accident: a Squirrel Hill local landed an internship after his mother spotted the job posting, converted to full-time, and today works out of New York City. “Pittsburgh is full of amazing talent,” boasted Shreyas.
AdSkate’s relationship with Brunner started as a client engagement. The AdSkate team had done campaign work for the agency directly. Brunner kept a close watch as AdSkate evolved through each stage of its pivot. The relationship felt natural and it was clear that the “meeting of the minds” they experienced was something special.
Brunner partners Kevin Amos, Partner and Chief Media and Data Officer, and Dan Gbur, Partner and Chief Revenue Officer, led the acquisition. The deal has closed, and AdSkate’s platform is being folded into Maximus, Brunner’s in-house operating system. Akaash is joining Brunner as Senior Director, AI and Innovation; Shreyas is joining as an AI and Technology Consultant; and AdSkate’s Max Rosen is joining as a Creative Technologist.
AdSkate and its acquisition is a times-two success story; Pittsburgh founders joining a world-class Pittsburgh-based creative firm supporting continued economic growth in the region.
Building an Ad-Tech Firm in Pittsburgh
When thinking about what it is like building a creative tech firm in Pittsburgh, both founders point to the region’s talent pool, and to Innovation Works and Carnegie Mellon specifically, as the two pillars that got them through the hard parts. The one honest drawback: Pittsburgh isn’t an ad-tech hub the way New York City is. Shreyas explained, “There are definitely bigger startup ecosystems than Pittsburgh, but I think Pittsburgh is a great place to start, and there’s enough support here to get you connected to those bigger ecosystems — mentors or investors in San Francisco, or for us, New York, because that’s where the ad-tech space is. The Pittsburgh ecosystem is mature enough to help you get connected to the right people wherever you market.”
Fail First, Succeed Second
Asked what advice they’d give a founder starting out today, both landed on the same idea from different angles. For Shreyas, “Don’t let perfection get in the way of progress. Get it out there, get slapped in the face — at least you’ll know what you need to fix, and you’ll learn.”
Failing first is a methodology that encourages early testing and learning by intentionally identifying potential points of weakness at the earliest stages to reduce risk. However, in startups, it is often unintentional, as you don’t always know what those are until you try it.
Akaash had to flip his thinking along the way recalling the grounding lesson of building a startup, “I came in with a notion of succeeding first and failing second. It was the exact opposite. We faced multiple roadblocks, product side and sales side, and you don’t realize those exist until you go through them.”
Shreyas’s advice for co-founders, reflecting on how they continued to improve and iterate, “The advice for newlyweds — never go to bed without resolving a fight, the same thing applies to the founder-world. The work never progresses otherwise. Might as well get it out there, have a beer, settle it. You agree to disagree, and then you move on.”
What’s Next for AdSkate
With the deal closed and the AdSkate team ported over to Brunner, Akaash and Shreyas are staying closely involved, evangelizing and deploying the AdSkate platform across Brunner’s existing and prospective clients, and helping embed it into the broader Maximus framework the agency is building.
