Audyence names Samir Kothavale VP of Product, its latest senior hire, as it builds out its leadership team amid triple-digit growth.
Audyence, B2B’s first and only programmatic marketplace for cost-per-lead inventory, today announced Samir Kothavale as its Vice President of Product. Kothavale leads product strategy and roadmap for the Audyence marketplace. His appointment is the latest in a series of senior hires as Audyence expands its leadership team, trending toward triple-digit annual growth following a year in which the company grew revenue 144 percent, more than doubling the business.
He knows how to turn a roadmap into revenue, and he is exactly the leader to build the product our customers and the market are asking for.”
— Karl Van Buren, CEO, Audyence
Kothavale joins a leadership team Audyence has been deliberately building. His appointment follows those of Chief Financial and Operating Officer Mike Farrar, VP of Marketing Veena Vadgama, and VP of Customer Experience Horst Carreño-Bauer, part of a sustained investment in senior talent as demand for the marketplace accelerates. Audyence has built the industry’s first and only programmatic ecosystem for B2B lead generation, connecting demand generation marketers and agencies to a marketplace of verified publishers, while also providing the centralized workflow automation, data, and governance modern demand marketers need to achieve the effectiveness and efficiency their roles demand.
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“Product is where our strategy becomes something customers can feel, and as we head into another year of strong growth, the pace and quality of what we ship will define how far we go,” said Karl Van Buren, CEO of Audyence. “Samir has spent his career building advertising and AI products that scale, and has taken two companies through acquisition. He knows how to turn a roadmap into revenue, and he is exactly the leader to build the product our customers and the market are asking for. I am thrilled to have him on board.”
Kothavale brings two company exits and a career building advertising and AI products. He co-founded Pictela, which gave brands a way to build and distribute rich digital ad creatives and was acquired by AOL in 2010. He later led product at Seva, a conversational AI company acquired by Bloomfire in 2023, and stayed on as VP of Product, where he led the company’s shift to an AI native platform for the enterprise market.
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“What drew me to Audyence is something rare in my experience as a product leader: a product that has already found its market,” said Samir Kothavale, Vice President of Product at Audyence. “Customers are getting guaranteed, transparent access to the leads they need, and they keep coming back. Finding that product-market fit is the hard part, and Audyence has it. What I’m focused on now is the next layer, using AI and the data moving through the marketplace to make every campaign perform better than the one before it. That is how the marketplace compounds. I could not be more excited to get started.”
As demand for a transparent, accountable, and efficient demand generation operating system accelerates, Audyence continues to invest in the product and team to meet it.
