Taiv Closes $13M Insider Round at Nearly $100M Valuation
Taiv, which uses AI to detect and replace live TV commercials in bars and restaurants with targeted ads and venue-specific content, has closed an oversubscribed $13M insider round with the company's valuation nearing $100M. The round, a mix of debt and equity, comes less than nine months after the company's $10.5M Series A and represents roughly a 60% valuation increase. Every existing institutional Series A investor came back, including Garage Capital (investing for a fourth time), Y Combinator (third time), Pioneer Fund (third time), IDC Ventures, and Emerging Capital.
The system works by watching live TV feeds inside venues, detecting when a commercial break starts, and swapping in different content: a bar's drink specials, a local event, or a paid ad from a national brand. Taiv runs its own edge hardware and real-time video models that handle the detection and insertion with sub-100 millisecond latency, giving venue owners control over what plays on their screens while creating a new revenue stream from the ad inventory Taiv sells to brands.
That network now spans close to 5,000 venues across North America, and it's creating a flywheel that's pulling in increasingly large advertisers. T-Mobile, Google, Fox, FanDuel, and Pepsi are all customers. A bigger venue footprint lets brands run larger campaigns with more precise audience targeting, and more ad dollars flowing in means higher monthly payouts to venues, which attracts more venues. The company has sustained nearly 3x annual growth since founding.
The new capital will go toward national expansion and further development of Taiv's AI models. The Series A was led by IDC Ventures with participation from Pioneer Fund, Y Combinator, FJ Labs, Garage Capital, and others.
Getting here wasn't straightforward. Palansky founded the company in 2018 with CTO Jordan Davis and chief business officer Avi Stoller. Then COVID shut down every restaurant in Canada. In early 2021, with under $100K in the bank, the three co-founders moved to Miami and gave themselves nine months to launch before the money ran out. They hit $100K in annual run rate their first month and $300K within six months. They raised a seed round off that traction and haven't slowed down since.
"I don't think we could have picked a harder business if we tried," Palansky said. "Hardware, capex, double-sided marketplace, low tolerance for AI model errors, huge scale needed to access demand, unproven market and playbook. It took a lot of perseverance and grit to grow this with relatively little cash in the early days. But now that we have scale, it's turning into a moat."
Palansky says 2026 will be a breakout year, and that the company is still early on its growth curve. Given the trajectory, the investors seem to agree.