Key Points
- Samba has acquired AI advertising platform Bestever AI as it accelerates development of autonomous advertising tools.
- Bestever founder and CEO Apoorva Govind is joining Samba as Director of Product and will lead the company’s AI product strategy.
- The acquisition adds Bestever’s generative AI capabilities for campaign planning, creative development and competitive analysis.
Samba has acquired Bestever AI, a generative artificial intelligence platform focused on advertising and marketing, as the media intelligence company moves deeper into AI-powered campaign planning and optimization.
As part of the deal, Bestever founder and Chief Executive Officer Apoorva Govind will join Samba as Director of Product, where she will lead the company’s AI product strategy. The entire Bestever team is also joining Samba.
Terms of the transaction were not disclosed.
The acquisition strengthens Samba’s efforts to build what it describes as an “agentic” advertising platform capable of autonomously researching brands, developing audience-targeting strategies and delivering campaign insights in real time.
Samba — which rebranded from Samba TV this week — said its AI ambitions are built around its existing media intelligence platform, which collects data from more than 1.5 billion opted-in users globally and analyzes viewing, streaming and online behavior across multiple devices and platforms.
“The next era of advertising belongs to agents that can act on real intelligence to rapidly expand the audiences we can reach, with more personalization, and across many more platforms all at once,” Samba Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer Ashwin Navin said in a statement.
Navin said Govind and her team will focus on expanding the company’s agentic advertising capabilities using Samba’s first-party data assets.
Founded in 2023, Bestever AI developed tools that automate brand research, competitive analysis and creative development using performance data. The startup attracted backing from Audacious Ventures, Offline Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz and F7 Ventures.
Before launching Bestever, Govind spent more than a decade in engineering leadership roles at Apple and Uber.
“Samba has something most AI companies can only dream about: a truly independent, deterministic view of how audiences behave across every screen, at massive scale,” Govind said. “That is the foundation that makes agentic advertising actually work.”
The acquisition comes as advertising and media companies increasingly invest in AI tools designed to automate campaign management and audience targeting. While much of the industry has focused on workflow automation, Samba is positioning its strategy around combining AI with proprietary audience and media consumption data.
The company said its platform currently analyzes more than 907 billion monthly data signals and integrates television, streaming, web and other media activity into a unified view of consumer behavior.
By integrating Bestever’s technology, Samba aims to automate tasks that traditionally required large analytics and data science teams, including audience discovery, campaign planning and performance optimization.
