Most of the world’s digital advertising flows through two companies. Google and Meta together control the majority of every rupee, dollar and pound that brands spend trying to reach people online. They own the platforms. They own the data and set the rules. Ishank Joshi does not want to fight them for that territory. He has a different plan.
Joshi is the chief executive of Mobavenue, a Mumbai-based technology company that helps brands place advertisements across the parts of the internet that sit outside those two giants. He calls this space the open internet. It includes news websites, streaming platforms, gaming apps, digital out-of-home displays and connected television screens. Nobody owns all of it. That is precisely the point. “We are not trying to compete with Google or Meta,” he told Storyboard18 in a recent conversation. “We are building for the space they cannot fully control.”
The company was founded in 2017. Joshi and his co-founders started out working in publishing and building apps. They learned how advertising worked from the inside. They saw which parts of the ecosystem were being underserved. When they built Mobavenue, they built it specifically for brands that wanted to reach audiences beyond the walls of the two dominant platforms.
The timing had a logic to it. Around 2015 and 2016, two things happened in India that changed the country’s internet economy permanently. UPI launched, making digital payments accessible to hundreds of millions of people for the first time. Reliance Jio arrived, making affordable mobile data widely available. Together those two developments brought a huge new population of internet users online. Not all of them lived inside Facebook or Google. Many discovered the internet through games, local news sites, streaming video and messaging services outside the big platform ecosystems. That audience needed to be reached. Mobavenue was built to reach them.
The company’s three core products each serve a different part of the advertising process. The first, called PrsmX, handles awareness. It places video advertising across screens of all kinds, including smartphones, smart televisions and digital displays in public spaces. The second, called SurgeX, is focused on helping brands find and bring in new users through a system that processes advertising bids automatically in real time. The third, called ReSurgeX, handles remarketing. It helps brands reconnect with people who have previously shown interest in their products but have not yet made a purchase.
What ties all three together is a data approach built around privacy. Tightening regulations across the world have made it harder for advertising companies to track individuals across websites without their knowledge. Browsers have been removing the small files that used to make that tracking possible. Some major platforms have changed the rules around how applications can share personal data with advertisers. These changes have hurt businesses that relied on cross-site tracking. They have helped businesses like Mobavenue, which was built from the start around working with data that users have actively agreed to share and with signals that do not depend on tracking a person across platforms.
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Joshi describes this as a structural advantage. While others scrambled to adapt when the rules changed, Mobavenue was already operating in the way the industry is now being forced to move toward. As reported, the company now works with more than 150 clients across global markets. It processes advertising placements in real time, meaning the system decides which advertisement to show to which person in a fraction of a second as a webpage or app loads. The entire platform was built on cloud infrastructure developed over three years. It is designed to run at the scale required to handle millions of individual decisions simultaneously without slowing down.
The broader market Mobavenue operates in is significant and growing. Independent advertising technology companies that serve the open internet are attracting attention from brands that have become nervous about concentrating all of their spending with two platforms. Budget diversification has become a genuine strategic concern for large advertisers. When one platform changes its rules or its targeting options, brands that put everything there have no alternative. Those that had already built relationships with the open internet are better protected.
Joshi is careful not to overstate what his company is doing. He acknowledges that Google and Meta have resources and reach that no independent company can match. He is not suggesting otherwise. His argument is simply that the part of the internet they do not own is large, growing and underserved. His company exists to serve it.
The question for Mobavenue, as for any independent technology company operating in this space, is whether it can grow quickly enough to establish a strong enough position before the large platforms expand further into the same territory. Joshi appears to believe the open internet is large enough to sustain a serious independent business. The clients he has accumulated so far suggest he is not alone in thinking so.
About the Author
Marcel Chidozie is a tech analyst and writer covering foreign news, fintech, and emerging technologies at TechRegard. Based in Nigeria, He's passionate about translating complex tech developments into compelling, accessible stories for diverse audiences. His work focuses on how technology shapes innovation across Africa and globally.
