AdExchanger has named Ribeye a finalist in the AI Innovators category for Video/Streaming/CTV in its 2026 Awards. Winners will be announced September 28 at the AdExchanger Awards Gala during Programmatic I/O New York at the New York Marriott Marquis.
Why this AdExchanger Award for AI Innovation matters
Look at the companies in our category: FreeWheel, Magnite, Perion. These are the names that have defined how premium video gets bought and sold for nearly two decades.
And then there’s Ribeye — founded in 2023, built for the part of the industry that usually gets served last.
Local media has spent years being handed technology designed for someone else. National-scale tools, retrofitted. Point solutions that don’t talk to each other. Workflows that assume a centralized ad ops team that most stations don’t have. The result is familiar to anyone who has sat in a local sales office: revenue that should be earned locally and kept locally instead leaks out through fees, friction, and manual work.
We built Ribeye to close that gap. Not by replacing the systems broadcasters already run, but by connecting them — an AI-powered revenue and ad operating system that unifies planning, selling, and fulfillment across digital programmatic and streaming television, and gives sellers the intelligence to act on what’s actually happening in their market.
Being recognized alongside the biggest names in video says something we’ve believed since day one: local media doesn’t need a smaller version of national technology. It needs technology built for how local actually works.
Ribeye is built with broadcasters, not for them
This recognition matters to our team because the product behind it didn’t come out of a whiteboard session.
It came out of hundreds of conversations with general managers, sales managers, and ad ops leads who told us plainly what was broken — the workflows that took six tools and four handoffs, the inventory that never got sold because nobody could see it in time, the reporting that arrived too late to change anything.
Then they trusted us to go fix it. Hundreds of 100 local broadcasters and agencies now run on Ribeye.
To our customers: this one’s yours too.
What’s next
Congratulations to our fellow finalists across every category — it’s genuinely great to be in this company.
We’ll see everyone on September 28th in New York!
