Index Exchange Acquires Machine Learning Company Rivr

Company continues machine learning investment and rapid expansion of its technical organization

Index Exchange Inc. , one of the world’s largest independent ad exchanges, announced its first-ever business acquisition of Rivr Technologies GmbH (Rivr), a Berlin-based company specializing in advanced machine learning-based traffic optimization capabilities. The acquisition accelerates Index’s efforts to address one of the industry’s biggest technical challenges, optimizing and curating the ever-growing scale of requests sent to DSPs.

Index and Rivr will integrate the team’s combined talents and technology, operating as a single machine learning and optimization team and platform. Rivr’s team of research and development engineers will join Index’s engineering organization under the leadership of Eran Udassin, vice president of machine learning and optimization engineering at Index. Previously, Udassin was head of research and development at Rivr. Udassin will report to Ray Ghanbari, chief technology officer at Index. Commercial members of the team, including Rivr CEO and co-founder, Jeff van Ede, will join Index for an interim period to ensure a seamless transition. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

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“With the addition of Rivr, we are uniquely positioned to deliver advanced machine learning-enabled optimization to the industry to increase efficiency and drive even better results for our customers,” said Ghanbari. “Our teams share the same vision and deep passion to build solutions that leverage machine learning to unlock more insights for media owners and buyers, enabling more efficient campaigns. This collaboration is a further testament to our dedication to innovation and commitment to shaping the future of ad tech.”

Combining Rivr’s core traffic shaping solution with Index’s recently rebuilt exchange, which processes over 270 billion slot requests daily and over three million slot requests per second, will further accelerate automation and efficiency across the exchange and drive significant value to the company’s customers. Since Ghanbari’s appointment in late 2021, Ray has been focused on operationalizing the technical organization and continuing to build out Index’s machine learning capabilities to set the path for a more accountable and efficient ecosystem.

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“Index is a true engineering-first company that is at the forefront of tackling industry challenges at scale,” said Udassin. “We are thrilled to be a part of a company that strategically aligns with our technical passions, and are looking forward to pushing the programmatic borders from within.”

Index also announced the hiring of Josh Prismon as chief architect and Brooke Trevino as vice president of quality and delivery, as well as the opening of its first engineering hub outside of North America, in Bengaluru, India. Prismon is based out of Colorado and Trevino out of California; both will report to Ghanbari. The company continues to rapidly expand its technical organization, which currently includes technology centers of excellence across Canada in Toronto, Kitchener, Montreal, the United States, and now, Germany and India.