Michael Grantmyre: Welcome everybody to the Client Success Stories, which are being released as part of Osler’s 2025 Deal Points report. My name is Michael Grantmyer, and I’m the co-author of the Deal Points report and a partner in Osler’s Emerging and High Growth Companies group based here in Calgary. I’m really excited to be joined by Noah Palansky, who is the CEO and co-founder of Taiv, a Y Combinator-backed company that replaces cable commercials with custom ads for 5,000 plus venues across North America. Named to the Forbes 30 Under 30, Noah has raised over 20 million dollars to scale Taiv’s technology for brands like ESPN and Budweiser. He’s a venture partner with Trillick Ventures and Pioneer Fund, a scout for Mistral Ventures, an active angel investor, and a former not-for-profit founder who raised one million dollars for cancer research before the age of 18. Welcome, Noah.
Noah Palansky: Thanks for having me, Michael.
Michael Grantmyre: Thanks for being here. So maybe just to start, it would be great to get in your own words, and I know I gave a little bit of an intro, but just in your own words, an overview of Taiv and what it does. We can call it the elevator pitch of sorts, if you’d like.
Noah Palansky: Yeah. So what we’re building is a way to give venues, more control over their TVs and over what happens within their four walls. So we partner up with restaurants, bars, convenience stores, gas stations, anybody who has a captive audience, and we connect to all their existing TVs, and when those TVs cut to commercial break, instead of showing competitors or unappetizing ads, we let them choose what will get shown. So either they can block out competitors, show a bit of their own content, and then we’ll go and sell ads to third parties and share that revenue, and we’ll do that completely for free. Or they can pay us and have control over most or all of the ad space to show whatever they want. And it’s really a way to, you know, block out competitors, lift their own sales, control their atmosphere, and offer a better customer experience.
Michael Grantmyre: That’s awesome. So kind of putting the power back in the venue’s hands. That’s amazing.
Noah Palansky: Yeah. That’s the idea.
Michael Grantmyre: Taiv recently raised, 13 million dollars in funding to scale its AI-powered in-venue advertising network. Could you speak a little bit to how you intend to allocate those funds across different areas like product development, market expansion and team growth? And related to that, what are the overall goals for Taiv over the next 12 to 18 months?
Noah Palansky: Yeah. For, for us, it’s really growth capital, and so we’ve hit a point where we have strong product market fit. Our customers love the product. New customers are really excited about joining. And we raised this round in order to be able to accelerate the pace at which we’re rolling this out, to scale the team, to scale our go-to-market, and to really help get Taiv into more venues across North America. And so, when we think about capital allocation, a lot of it’s going to the actual hardware cost of buying these units. A lot of it’s going to sales and marketing and growing that team. And then, of course, we’re investing in product. And we’ve always really believed that the best product wins. And about a third of our team are, are engineers and software developers, and we continue to keep it that way. And so, as we grow the sales and go-to-market team, we’re also meaningfully growing our engineering team.
Michael Grantmyre: I love that. So the in-venue advertising space is becoming more competitive. So from your perspective, thinking about Taiv’s business, what distinguishes Taiv’s AI-powered approach from, more traditional advertising solutions? And how do you see your technology as creating unique value for both the venue operators and the advertisers?
Noah Palansky: For venue operators, it really comes back to that elevator pitch where without Taiv, they have no control. The TVs are the only place within their four walls that they have no control over, and 25 percent of the time they’re showing ads. And so giving them that power, giving them the ability to choose what they want to show, how they want their environment to work, to run music during commercial breaks, to just make a better guest experience is really valuable, and it’s something we’ve really pioneered, and, and invented ourselves as a new category. On the flip side to advertisers, it’s really valuable premium inventory. And so, you know, when it’s a commercial break and our product kicks in, you know, it’s often showing live sports. It’s showing really hard to reach, hard to reach, content like the NFL or March Madness. And so being able to play during the commercial breaks of those events, being able to target with all sorts of data. And so our AI system is able to pick out things like what teams are playing, who’s winning, how long is left in the game, and we’re actually able to map that to the sentiment and the emotional state of the audience. So, if we know that the Toronto Maple Leafs are playing, and it’s a close game, and there’s three minutes left, we can then map that to an excited audience, and maybe a nervous audience and actually sell that as, as a moment and as a package to advertisers who want to associate with that specific sentiment. And so we’re able to get really, really granular with things, whereas with traditional TV advertising, you’re just kind of buying a generic spot. You’re committing to it often nine to twelve months ahead of running it, and it’s a lot less flexible. And the other piece of it is that we’re making those spots available to people who are regional or mid-market advertisers or even local advertisers who wouldn’t have been able to access national live sports inventory before because there’s such large minimums that you typically have to buy. And so it’s really opening it up to a wider range of buyers.
Michael Grantmyre: Great. That makes a lot of sense. Moving on to the next question. Following, your most recent funding round, what does Taiv’s roadmap look in terms of geographic expansion and new venue partnerships? Shout out for your venue activityin Manitoba, which is really exciting, obviously. Are there particular sectors and venue types that you see as especially promising for Taiv’s technology in the near term?
Noah Palansky: In the near term for us, it’s really about growing what’s already working. And so we’re taking this restaurant and bar category, and we’re expanding first across the U.S. and then across North America. And so today we’re in about, 32 different major metro markets in the U.S. and we plan to be in most major metros by the end of this year, so fifty to seventy in the U.S. We’re also in Winnipeg, and we expand — plan to expand across Canada, but probably not until early next year. We’re big believers that you conquer one market before you move into the next. And so for us, Winnipeg serves more as a test market right now than anything. But once we properly launch Canada, you know, we’ll do all the major cities across the country. Then we’re also looking to expand it in the convenience store and gas station segment where we’ve also seen a lot of success. We’re pretty constantly evaluating other industries where Taiv could make sense, but we’re just not quite ready to launch them until we see success in these first ones.
Michael Grantmyre: Makes sense. And for our last question for you, what’s your advice to other founders, particularly in the current market, when it comes to getting investment? I mean, you’ve been really successful at raising capital.This market is a little bit more challenging on whole forpeople. What’s your advice to other founders?
Noah Palansky: What’s worked really well for me is, and it sounds really obvious, just building a good business. And so I think when you try and build something that’s designed for investors, it’s very hard to raise capital. When you try and build a business that’s designed to provide customers a lot of value, you build something people love, you build something with strong unit economics, it becomes a lot easier to attract investors because they see how good the outcome can be. So that’s my biggest piece of advice. The second one is that, you know, it’s worth running fundraising as a proper process. And so decide you’re going to raise, figure out how much you can raise, talk to other founders, and figure out what is realistic to raise in this market. And then in parallel, talk to as many funds as you can and create a competitive environment where, you create real market forces and can actually have leverage to get good terms. If you’re sort of ad hoc, always raising, funds will drag out the process, conviction will go down over time. It’s much harder to get anything over the line, and if it does get over the line, the terms you’re going to receive aren’t going to be nearly as competitive. Versus if you time box it and you just say, “Okay, we’re now raising, we’re going to go talk to a hundred different funds, and we’re going to see who’s interested,” you really do get better terms, and you also get the round closed a lot faster.
Michael Grantmyre: That’s great advice, Noah. Thank you. Well, thank you for joining us, Noah. Thank you for telling us a little bit more about Taiv, and for speaking a little bit more about where Taiv is headed. It’s all very exciting.
Noah Palansky: Thanks Michael. Happy to do it.
