The Coalition for Innovative Media Measurement today selected six early-stage companies for its inaugural Startup Program, providing complimentary membership access to an industry initiative focused on advancing television and video advertising measurement. The announcement marks CIMM's first formal outreach to emerging technology providers working on solutions ranging from AI-powered campaign automation to real-time co-viewing verification.

According to the Coalition's February 3 announcement, Aqxle, BranchLab, DAIVID, Simantea, Vuer and Wantent will receive full access to CIMM programs, meetings, events, research and networking opportunities without membership fees for one year. The selection followed a rigorous review process conducted by CIMM's executive team and Steering Committee evaluating applicants against the organization's core mission of advancing innovations in measurement, currency development, metrics and data collaboration across the media and advertising ecosystem.

The television measurement industry faces fundamental infrastructure challenges as viewing fragments across linear broadcast, streaming platforms and connected television devices. New research released in January found the U.S. television advertising market can financially support multiple competing measurement companies, but operating a competitive service requires approximately $250 million in annual revenue to remain profitable. The costs stem from licensing viewing data from cable boxes and smart TVs, maintaining measurement panels, and building technical infrastructure capable of tracking audiences across fragmented platforms.

AI agents automate legacy workflows

Aqxle, led by Bharad Ramesh, positions its system of AI agents as an intelligence layer that unifies fragmented data to automate legacy research and media workflows for marketers. The company describes its technology as accelerating time to insights and decisions by handling repetitive analytical tasks that traditionally required manual data assembly across disconnected systems.

The emergence of agentic AI throughout 2025 demonstrated how autonomous systems could transform advertising operations. Amazon launched its Ads Agent for automated campaign management on November 11, processing natural language instructions to execute complex workflows across Amazon Marketing Cloud and its demand-side platform. LiveRamp announced agentic orchestration capabilities on October 1, enabling autonomous agents to access identity resolution and audience activation platforms. Multiple advertising technology companies compressed months of infrastructure development into single weeks during fall 2025 as platforms raced to establish positioning within emerging agentic standards.

Aqxle's focus on marketing workflows addresses a persistent operational challenge where data exists across multiple platforms, formats and vendors, requiring significant manual effort to extract, reconcile and analyze before generating actionable insights. Marketing organizations typically maintain data across attribution platforms, campaign management systems, customer relationship management tools, and analytics environments that don't communicate effectively without custom integration work or manual export-import processes.

Healthcare commercialization through neural networks

BranchLab, founded by Josh Walsh and Michael Parkes, operates as an AI platform for pharmaceutical commercialization. The company's Pathwai platform enables pharmaceutical brands to design, activate and measure audiences defined by real-world health outcomes such as prescriptions, diagnoses or healthcare visits using non-health data.

According to BranchLab's description, the company uses proprietary neural networks that predict health outcomes in demographic data to enable privacy-safe, high-performing activation. The approach addresses a fundamental constraint facing healthcare advertising: regulations like the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act limit how pharmaceutical marketers can collect, use and share data about healthcare providers and their practices.

The pharmaceutical advertising sector faces projections that U.S. healthcare digital advertising spending will surpass $20 billion by 2026. StackAdapt announced in-platform National Provider Identifier targeting and measurement capabilities on January 6, enabling pharmaceutical marketers to execute deterministic, one-to-one healthcare professional campaigns without third-party handoffs. The integration eliminated operational workflows that previously required managed service activation or external vendor coordination.

BranchLab maintains offices in Boulder, Colorado; New York; and San Francisco. The company describes itself as setting a new standard in privacy-first, outcome-based commercialization for healthcare. Its mission centers on advancing how the healthcare industry understands and positively influences health outcomes by transforming everyday data into meaningful clinical insight.

Creative effectiveness measurement at scale

DAIVID, led by Ian Forrester, positions itself as the advertising industry's most reliable and scalable source of creative data, powering strategy and performance in the age of AI. The platform evaluates advertising effectiveness across key drivers of attention, emotion, memory and intent.

Forrester and co-founder Barney co-founded DAIVID after working in the business of creative effectiveness since 2012. The company characterizes its approach as coupling cutting-edge AI with industry knowledge, describing team members as insiders who understand what data means beyond producing charts. DAIVID's focus addresses growing advertiser demands for quantifiable creative performance data as measurement capabilities expand across the industry.

Nielsen announced an expansion of its measurement capabilities in December 2024, integrating Realeyes' attention technology for deeper advertising creative analysis. The technical foundation of Realeyes' system builds on more than 17 million human observations, analyzing attention and emotion across more than 350 billion frames of video content. The system applies facial coding to predictive analytics, generating actionable performance metrics.

Bain & Company Partner Cesar Brea highlighted the structural significance of attention metrics in advertising effectiveness, stating that advertising effectiveness at enterprise scale requires an industry transformation whereby attention data are systematically embedded inside media, audience and creative systems to enable precise planning, delivery and measurement for continuous performance improvement.

Single-source purchase and media tracking

Simantea, led by Pete East, provides access to high-quality, single-source purchase and media data in real-time powered by a mobile application. The app tracks continuous capture of purchases, web and app usage, location, and television and digital advertisement exposure from a nationally representative panel.

The company describes its approach as resetting the equation for consumer panels. Traditional panel providers minimize rewards to participants in favor of fixing data after collection. Simantea positions itself as creating a community of users that are rewarded fairly and vested in the quality of data collected, meaning clients can access high-quality, single-source purchase and media data in real-time.

Single-source measurement - tracking both media exposure and purchase behavior from the same individuals - has long represented a goal for advertising measurement. The approach enables direct correlation between advertising exposure and subsequent purchase actions without relying on aggregated data that may obscure individual consumer journeys or attribution models that estimate rather than observe connections between exposure and outcomes.

The fragmentation of media consumption across platforms has intensified demands for comprehensive tracking. Comscore expanded its campaign measurement platform on December 15 with streaming audio tracking and enhanced Meta reporting, addressing fragmentation across television, digital and social channels. The measurement company positioned the expansion as addressing advertiser needs for unified measurement where consumers move between television, connected TV, digital publishers, social platforms and streaming audio.

Real-time co-viewing verification

Vuer, led by Omar Delgado, offers real-time verification of television co-viewing, creating a scalable, audience-based currency for both linear and connected TV advertising. The platform enables publishers, agencies and demand-side platforms to transact using verified co-viewing data.

Nine out of 10 people watch television with their mobile device nearby or in use, according to Vuer. The company uses this proximity as a natural proxy to determine human presence beyond the glass screen. Vuer's Viewrify technology enables popular mobile applications to detect when nearby televisions are streaming over-the-top content, unlocking granular viewing insights with what the company describes as unprecedented scalability.

Viewrify feeds directly into supply-side platforms, verifying impressions and co-viewing in real time to drive higher bids, justify larger spends and attract new advertisers. The solution ensures privacy through operating system-level transparency, anonymized and time-limited data with one-time user consent to find Bluetooth devices.

The technology takes multiple snapshots per second to estimate each user's distance from the connected TV, revealing time spent, number of co-viewers, and attention levels based on second-screen usage. Over-the-top platforms can now extrapolate their panel-based insights beyond the household, down to the individuals and the specific content and advertisements appearing on screen.

Co-viewing represents a persistent measurement challenge for television advertising. Traditional household-level measurement doesn't account for how many people actually watch advertisements or which household members view content. Measurement companies incorporate person-level tracking across devices, accounting for scenarios where viewers encounter content on different screens or engage in co-viewing on connected television devices, combining digital opt-in panels with census network data and passively-collected set-top-box viewership information.

Emotional engagement through AI analysis

Wantent, led by Lesha Shaldenko, operates as an AI-driven emotion and content measurement platform that monitors real-time, moment-by-moment audience reactions across human and AI audience panels. The system decodes facial and behavioral signals to uncover and predict authentic emotional engagement with media.

According to Wantent, 90 percent of people's emotions are made subconsciously based on emotions. The platform tracks 20 emotional states in real time so advertisers can understand where audiences are engaged. The reporting also flags problem areas or scenes where engagement drops, enabling advertisers to optimize emotional pacing within creative executions.

Wantent's proprietary AI model employs sophisticated neural networks trained on open, closed and proprietary datasets reflecting diversity of age, race and cultures. The model has been validated and calibrated by a team of cognitive psychologists experienced in identifying facial movements and microexpressions as reflective of emotional states. The system has been trained on and tested against advanced electroencephalography and brain test software renowned in medical and research fields.

The platform supports testing for brands, research agencies, content creators, political campaigns, organizations, media companies and consultancies. Wantent can test advertising, episodes, features, news, speeches, training, concepts, storyboards, scripts, animatics, packaging, print, digital and social content. The system tracks 20 emotions, four attention types, empathy tracking, pose and gaze detection, sentiment analysis and content attribute mapping.

Industry networking and visibility

Program members gain exposure and direct access to potential customers and partners. CIMM's established members benefit from early visibility into frontier technologies shaping the future of measurement, advertising effectiveness and video.

Evan Cohen, Senior Vice President of Projects and Strategic Initiatives at CIMM, stated in the announcement that across the applicant pool, the Coalition saw companies deeply focused on solving real industry needs with privacy-forward, data-driven solutions, which made the selection process exceptionally difficult. The companies demonstrate the depth and rigor of innovation currently underway in measurement, currency and effectiveness, and CIMM is proud to foster collaboration around these solutions.

The privacy-first measurement approaches developed by the startup cohort align with broader industry trends toward privacy-preserving technologies. Anonym announced a partnership with Pinterest in December 2025, allowing advertisers to measure campaign effectiveness while maintaining control over proprietary datasets through privacy-preserving technology. The collaboration addresses how brands hold valuable first-party data that remains underutilized because activating it on major platforms requires sacrificing data governance controls or accepting technical complexity that outweighs potential benefits.

The CIMM Startup Program runs for one year, followed by new cohorts selected for each subsequent calendar year. Organizations interested in applying for the 2027 cohort can find additional information at https://cimm-us.org/startup-program/.

Coalition structure and membership

The Coalition for Innovative Media Measurement operates as a non-partisan, pan-industry coalition focused on cultivating improvements, best practices and innovations in measurement and currency, new metrics and approaches to understanding the value of media, and data collaboration and enablement.

CIMM's members include leading networks, studios, streamers and programmers, multichannel video programming distributors, television original equipment manufacturers and operating system providers, major digital businesses, agencies, measurement and data providers, trade bodies and consultants. CIMM functions as a subsidiary of the Advertising Research Foundation and adheres to the ARF's principles of scientific rigor, objectivity and evidence-based research.

The Startup Program was introduced in 2025 as a learning, partnership-development and networking initiative designed for early-stage companies building product solutions aligned with CIMM's core mission. The program provides early-stage companies with access to established industry participants who face the measurement challenges the startups aim to solve.

The selection of these six companies reflects persistent fragmentation challenges facing television advertising measurement. Cross-media measurement complexity has intensified as audiences fragment across devices and platforms. CIMM announced in January that it would spearhead a European cross-media measurement research study examining how different markets have developed varying measurement infrastructures reflecting local media ownership structures, regulatory environments and industry relationships.

Different stakeholders face differing motivations and incentives around measurement standardization. Broadcasters may resist sharing granular viewing data with competitors. Platforms that invested heavily in proprietary measurement may be reluctant to adopt external standards. Advertisers want measurement that enables comparison across all media channels regardless of who provides those channels.

The startup cohort's technologies address these challenges through various approaches: AI agents that unify fragmented data, privacy-preserving neural networks that enable compliant targeting, real-time verification systems that eliminate panel-based estimation, single-source tracking that connects exposure to outcomes, and emotional analysis that quantifies creative effectiveness beyond basic attention metrics.

Timeline

Summary

Who: The Coalition for Innovative Media Measurement selected six early-stage technology companies - Aqxle, BranchLab, DAIVID, Simantea, Vuer and Wantent - for its inaugural Startup Program. The selection was conducted by CIMM's executive team and Steering Committee following a rigorous review process.

What: A one-year, no-cost membership program providing full access to CIMM programs, meetings, events, research and networking opportunities for early-stage companies developing solutions across measurement and currency, metrics and data collaboration. The selected companies offer technologies ranging from AI agent automation and privacy-preserving pharmaceutical targeting to real-time co-viewing verification and emotional engagement tracking.

When: CIMM announced the inaugural cohort on February 3, 2026. The Startup Program was introduced in 2025 as a learning, partnership-development and networking initiative. New cohorts will be selected for each subsequent calendar year, with applications opening for the 2027 cohort.

Where: The program operates across the United States media and advertising ecosystem, with selected companies maintaining operations in New York, Colorado, California and other locations. CIMM functions as a subsidiary of the Advertising Research Foundation and serves a membership base including networks, studios, streamers, agencies, measurement providers and advertising technology companies.

Why: The program addresses persistent fragmentation in television advertising measurement as viewing shifts across linear broadcast, streaming platforms and connected television devices. CIMM created the initiative to provide early-stage companies with access to potential customers and partners while giving established members early visibility into frontier technologies shaping measurement, advertising effectiveness and video. The selected companies demonstrate privacy-forward, data-driven approaches to solving real industry needs around unified data infrastructure, compliant healthcare targeting, creative effectiveness quantification, single-source tracking, verified co-viewing and emotional engagement analysis.

Share this article
The link has been copied!