Today, we are excited to share that tvScientific has reached a definitive agreement to be acquired by Pinterest.
As the company’s largest shareholder, Norwest has been fortunate to partner with co-founder and CEO Jason Fairchild and co-founder and CPO David Koye since the Series A, supporting the team as they helped steer the industry into a new era of TV advertising.
At Norwest, we look for companies that reimagine large, entrenched industries, and tvScientific has done exactly that. From our earliest meetings with Jason and David, we saw a rare combination of deep industry experience, a compelling product vision, and ability to scale and execute. Since our initial investment, they have performed magnificently.
A Market Ripe for Reinvention
Long before founding tvScientific, Jason and David knew the next wave of advertising disruption would inevitably happen in the Connected TV (CTV) space.
Consumer adoption of CTV had already crossed the tipping point, positioning CTV advertising to become a rapidly growing sector within the overall advertising market for television. The opportunity and the challenge was to unlock a new era of TV advertising through a simple, self-serve platform capable of delivering the kind of transparent, digital-like measurability that advertisers had never been able to access on traditional linear TV.
By 2021, the CTV market was accelerating. The U.S. CTV advertising ecosystem had become both large and fast growing, buoyed by three powerful tailwinds: rising costs for other forms of digital advertising, including search and social; a mass shift toward streaming viewership; and sufficient CTV ad inventory for brands to scale their ad spend effectively.
Backing the Company Early On
In 2022, Norwest had the privilege of leading tvScientific’s Series A. We doubled down on our belief in the company in its Series B round earlier this year.
Partnering early on with the company gave us a close look at how they were building for where the market was moving, investing in the infrastructure and measurement rigor that performance marketers needed.
tvScientific’s product vision has always centered on giving performance marketers the ability to buy and measure TV the same way they buy and measure search and social. With advanced data science, flexible engagement, and radical transparency, the company made it possible to track and optimize CTV campaigns in real time. This shift laid the groundwork for what the industry increasingly refers to as TV 2.0.
As adoption grew, we watched tvScientific quickly become one of the most exciting companies in the massive shift from linear to streaming TV. In a landscape where marketers need clear proof of ROI and are migrating ad budgets toward channels that eliminate guesswork, tvScientific’s platform emerged as a differentiator. The company’s focus on measurable outcomes positioned it at the center of one of the most important transformations in advertising. The result was explosive growth.
Congratulations to the tvScientific team
To us, this milestone is meaningful and well-earned. It has been a privilege for us to work alongside the tvScientific team, and we have been consistently impressed by their determination to open CTV as a performance channel for modern marketers. As the broader market continues shifting toward transparency and outcome-first strategies, tvScientific’s mission has never been more relevant. We believe the team is well positioned to continue shaping the future of performance TV.
To Jason and David, thank you for your trust and partnership. To other leaders at the company, including Mike Burke, Emily Robinson, Spencer Weinman, Chris Johnson and many others, it has been a pleasure working with you (and enjoying the tradition of ice cream after every board dinner!). We have so admired your talent, drive, professionalism and integrity – you are a first class team.
It has been an honor to support tvScientific’s journey from the early days, and we look forward to seeing the outsized impact that you will continue to have on the industry.
