Top Adtech Startups in 2027

Applecart is a high growth marketing technology company based in New York City, founded in 2013. Applecart has developed a proprietary social graph platform that uses publicly available data to map over 25 billion social relationships between more than 250 million adult Americans. Applecart’s platform helps major corporations, national nonprofit organizations, and high-profile political campaigns with their highest stakes marketing challenge: reaching hard-to-reach audiences of decision makers, spanning corporate executives, legislators, regulators, investors, members of the media, and more. For years, marketing technology businesses have focused on solving b2c (consumer) marketing challenges (e.g. look-a-like modeling to find new customers), but the traditional pay-per-impression advertising model has left a massive opportunity unsolved for: how to market when a company’s target isn’t the average consumer, but is instead a single, senior decision maker. Applecart is the solution to this problem for some of the world’s most prominent organizations. Quick facts about us: Applecart has generated over $30M in revenue, with annual revenues in excess of $10M. Our senior leadership team includes two members of the 2021 Forbes 30 under 30 list for Marketing and Advertising, a former senior White House advisor, one of the earliest sales leaders at Google and Twitter, and two of the Democratic Party’s most successful pollsters and strategists Our investors include global sports, entertainment and marketing giant Endeavor, KKR Co-Chairman and Co-CEO Henry Kravis, entrepreneur Chris Burch, a founder of Palantir, senior engineering leaders at Twitter and Yelp, past CEOs of Fortune 50 companies and a number of well-known venture capitalists. Endeavor CEO Ari Emanuel is a board member of the company. Current and past clients include Blackstone, Boeing, KKR, the Environmental Defense Fund, the Business Roundtable, Governor John Kasich, Congressman Conor Lamb and Republican Vote

A platform that automates the collection, assignment and execution against that physical world data that transforms businesses

Vidsy is the new way to create. Powered by a disruptive tech platform, vetted network of creators and market leading expertise, Vidsy helps the world’s leading brands create quality video advertising at scale. At the cutting edge of video advertising, Vidsy is strategic partners with Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat and Twitter while also being awarded Facebook’s Global Innovator for ‘Creativity in Video’. Vidsy is on a mission to empower a million creators to make a living doing what they love. For more information visit vidsy.co

matchinguu is a mobile ad-tech company. Our goal is to change the way app publishers and advertisers interact with audiences. Through our realtime push- and proximity-marketing platform we empower engagement that is more targeted and highly relevant. We believe that optimizing audience sizes for relevance will always lead to the highest customer satisfaction and conversion. A seamless flow between the physical reality and the digital world is optimizing ROI for our app publishers. By connecting apps in our network, we provide new options to grow traffic and deliver innovative monetization opportunities without being intrusive to their users.

Kiwii is building a new type of gamified brand engagement platform. Every day at 8 PM, Kiwii features one brand, one digital scratch card, and one opportunity for each user to unlock a reward — such as a discount, exclusive offer, free product, experience, or surprise reward. Instead of brands competing for attention in crowded advertising feeds, Kiwii gives one brand the spotlight for the day and turns passive advertising into an interactive experience users have a reason to return to. Our positioning is simple: Scratch. Win. Share. Kiwii is designed to create a daily consumer habit while giving brands a new way to acquire, engage and retain customers. Advertising is becoming increasingly crowded and expensive. Consumers see thousands of marketing messages, but very few give them a reason to actively engage. Kiwii changes the interaction. For users Instead of scrolling through another advertisement: Come back → Scratch → Discover a brand → Unlock a reward → Share it. For brands Instead of simply buying impressions: Get the daily spotlight → Engage users → Deliver a reward → Generate measurable interaction.

Creators don't have a content problem. They have a workflow problem. The average creator juggles 5-7 disconnected tools to go from idea to published post — one app for captions, another for editing, another for scheduling, another for analytics. Nothing talks to each other. Every handoff is a place where momentum, quality, or time gets lost. Infleuince is the infrastructure that closes those gaps. It's a unified system that coordinates the full content lifecycle — ideation, generation, transformation, publishing, and analytics — in one continuous flow instead of five disconnected ones. Think of it less as another creator app, and more as the operating layer underneath creator workflows entirely. We didn't build this from a hunch. Through NSF I-Corps (University of Virginia) and two rounds of customer discovery with 25+ creators, we found that editing was the #1 unprompted pain point, speed and time savings were the most valued outcome, and 73% of creators said they'd pay to solve it. Infleuince is built directly against that data. We're pre-revenue with an active, converting waitlist, backed by completion of NSF I-Corps and the two19 fellowship, and building in the open with the same tool we ask creators to trust — Infleuince runs on Infleuince. If you believe creator tooling should be infrastructure, not a feature graveyard, we're building the category.

Firsthand is an exciting seed-stage startup at the cutting edge of media, commerce, and AI. We’re founded and funded by some of NYC’s most prolific tech builders, plus well-backed by top-tier VCs and AI pioneers. We have offices in NYC and also support hybrid work. We welcome top talent from anywhere in the United States.