Sincera co-founder Ian Meyers on scaling at The Trade Desk and being ‘irrationally bullish’ on ad tech

Ian Meyers and Mike O’Sullivan co-founded Sincera in early 2022 to solve a problem they faced as technical product managers: The open internet was opaque. While building products for the programmatic ecosystem, they realized there was a lack of hard data regarding the complex plumbing — metadata, technical setups and ad quality — that powers the open internet.

Sincera became that solution, deploying crawlers that act as synthetic users to analyze the technical reality of ad inventory. Since being acquired by The Trade Desk in early 2025, the platform has evolved from a scrappy startup tool into a core component of the buying ecosystem.

The Current caught up with Meyers to discuss how the last 12 months have transformed Sincera’s infrastructure, the power of holding a mirror up to publishers and why he is “irrationally bullish” on ad tech in 2026.

This conversation has been edited for clarity and length.

When you look at Sincera’s infrastructure today versus the week before The Trade Desk acquisition, what’s the most meaningful change under the hood?

The most clarifying change is having access to the bidder platform — seeing what buyers are buying or avoiding.

The analogy I use is that Sincera has always been a fleet of secret shoppers. Before the acquisition, we were going out to stores, checking the shelves and reporting back on what we saw. But now, we have the corporate sales data too. We have the “bottoms-up” view of the secret shopper combined with the “top-down” view of what is happening in the market as a whole.

Having those two integrated creates a flywheel effect. We can prioritize our work based on where the money is actually flowing. It allows us to layer meaning onto the technical signals we collect and prioritize the signals and coverage that matters most to advertisers, which wasn’t really possible when we were a separate company.

How has being inside The Trade Desk’s ecosystem changed how you think about building for buyers versus building for publishers?

It forces you to up-level the conversation and focus on impact. As technical founders, we can get really focused on configurations and technical details. But being inside the ecosystem forces us to ask: Why does a buyer care?

Why does a buyer care about a specific transaction ID, a heavy page load or a high ads-to-content ratio? We are now able to connect those technical signals directly to business outcomes. It has shifted our mindset from just analyzing the plumbing to fixing it and explaining why that plumbing matters to a media plan.

You launched OpenSincera to make this data public. How important has that transparency been for adoption across the ecosystem?

It has been super important. One of the great things about the open internet — but also one of the things that makes it frustrating at times — is that there are so many players operating on different sets of facts. We believe it is important to “show our work.”

When we talk about what a highly efficient inventory source looks like, we need to demonstrate it with data. Yes, we are giving something away, but it’s a win-win. It raises the water line for the whole ecosystem. Selfishly, we also get great feedback about how to improve the product to serve more users and more use cases. Users of OpenSincera tell us when something looks wrong or could be better, which helps us fix bugs and improve our core data. A healthy open internet is good for everyone, but especially TTD.

Speaking of feedback, what kind of real-world impact are you seeing when you present this data to publishers?

It allows us to hold a mirror up to the ecosystem. We often get feedback from publishers who say, “There is no way my ads refresh at 15 seconds. That’s not possible.” Because we have the data, we can show them the specific page and the specific code triggering that refresh. Almost every time, it turns out to be a bug or partner they weren’t aware of.

That feedback loop is incredibly high impact. It clears up the discrepancy between what a publisher thinks is happening on their site and what is actually happening. It creates better inventory for buyers and improved monetization for publishers.

Are you seeing a difference between publishers who are proactive about this data versus those who aren’t?

Definitely. The publishers who are best set up for success are the ones who remain curious. They don’t view their tech stack as a fixed status quo — “I set up my header bidding, I’m done.” Instead, they view it as an always-on task where there are always iterations and new things to learn. They want to know what buyers are thinking and advocate for their unique content, audience and experiences. The forward-looking publishers are using this data to look for their edge.

Did the last year prove any assumptions wrong regarding the technology required to scale this data?

One assumption, or perhaps a legacy mindset, was that you needed massive, dedicated machine-learning pipelines to solve classification problems. Being part of The Trade Desk gave us access to significant compute scale at lower costs, which allowed us to utilize large language models (LLMs) for the “boring stuff.”

For example, we introduced a “similar publishers” feature in OpenSincera, built entirely on LLMs. We were able to rip out a legacy machine-learning pipeline, retire it and get much better quality as a result. Leveraging that scale also allowed us to collect more signal, for example, breaking out data by mobile versus desktop, which was previously too expensive or difficult to compute as a scrappy startup.

On a personal note, are you bullish about the year ahead in ad tech — and what’s giving you the most confidence right now?

As a founder, you have to be almost irrationally bullish, but I am very confident in ad tech for 2026.

When you look at the smartest, most successful companies in the world, companies like Netflix or OpenAI, when they look for sustainable growth, the answer is almost always advertising. Even companies that start out saying “advertising isn’t our thing” eventually turn to it because it is the most effective model for scaling services at low cost to end users.

I believe a fair, scaled, programmatic auction is the best way to price that attention. There is economic uncertainty ahead, but the fundamental need for efficient advertising infrastructure isn’t going away.

The Current is owned and operated by The Trade Desk Inc.