The Founder & CEO of the video advertising platform VDO.AI, Amitt Sharma, gauged the market over a decade ago and saw the possibility of a sweeping change in the world of advertising even as his contemporaries were evaluating career choices while on the brink of higher education. A teen prodigy, Amitt began his first company when he was all of 15 years, investing in his passion for software technology and physics and developing software products, consisting of games and utilities, aimed at facilitating users. With off-centre ideas and forecasting abilities stemming from his progressive mind, he left the proverbial nest at 18 years to design and create category leading products.
At 28 today, the serial-entrepreneur, futurist, and inventor lays claim to an enviable body of achievements. In 2007, he co-founded SuperSource for internet marketing and software development, expanded his wings further to establish Zomobo, a real-time multimedia and social encyclopaedia in 2011 and Ozock, a social-content destination on the internet. He successfully co-founded and exited StatMyWeb as a third-party web statistics and analytics platform.
With the markets opening up to a range of broadcast channels and publications in the past decade and several new brands coming in to adapt to the rapidly evolving technology, Amitt capitalized on the evident need to think beyond the regular TV commercials in the press, radio, and outdoor advertising. He joined hands with Arjit Sachdeva in 2018 to set up VDO.AI under the aegis of Z1 Media. The self-taught tech whizz developed VDO.AI with the objective of facilitating web publishers to tap the endless seamless benefits of video advertising and consequently boost their monetization by up to 50% through targeted advertising. The startup has offices in India and California and presently monetizes over 6 billion video impressions every month with a network of 1200+ web publishers.
Having built more than 80 products in the last 13 years, his keen business acumen helped him learn the trades of bootstrapping into a multi-million-dollar company and sell two companies to MNCs in the USA and Australia and has two patents in the pipeline.
Not one to say no to innovative thinking and experiments, Amitt has published 5 research papers in IEEE, worked with the prestigious NASA as an Innovator for Space Apps and the MIT Media Lab. At NASA he invented a smart space glove that senses EMG motor neuron activity from natural hand gestures and he also worked with the professors and students of MIT Media Lab to build innovative solutions.
When not innovating or thinking ahead, Amitt spends time reading books on philosophy, astronomy, and scientific research. He has been running VDO.AI without any external funding so far and has invested millions of dollars’ worth resources and money into the platform. Of late, he has been engaging in talks with leading private equity players for prospective fundraising at a 9-figure valuation, as he scales up further in realizing VDO.AI’s mission to help keep information and internet free of cost for users.
His success mantra lies in his constant efforts to outthink and not out compete in the technology space. Driven by his zest for knowledge and the spirit of challenging the future through his disruptive thinking, Amitt is looking at creating a favourable and flourishing high-value video advertising ecosystem with the help of a strong team and growth culture in place. The techie entrepreneur is currently reading the Blitz scaling to take cues from for his business and marking starting points for new future-ready ideas. This may well be the beginning of many things on the radar for the young man who has worked and scaled up the ladder based on his ‘spirit of inquiry’ approach to learn, challenge, and create solutions to problems, often long before they surface.