For decades, the TV screens inside bars and restaurants have been locked into whatever feed came through the cable box. When the game cut to commercial, venue owners had no say in what filled the break.
Taiv is changing that, and investors are betting big on the idea.
The company just closed a $13 million growth round, combining debt and equity, representing roughly a 60% valuation increase since its Series A. The raise brings total capital raised to more than $30 million, with Taiv’s valuation now just under $100 million. The round was oversubscribed and led by IDC Ventures, with participation from all existing institutional Series A investors: Y Combinator (its third investment in the company), Garage Capital (its fourth), and Emerging Capital.
For CEO and co-founder Noah Palansky, the raise marks a shift from proving the model to scaling it.
“The big use of funds is growth,” he said. “This was our first true growth round. We’ve found product market fit and customers love the product. They love working with us and we have really high retention. The business fundamentally works, and now it’s about how do we scale this thing up.”
Scaling means people and hardware.
Taiv has grown from about 30 employees to roughly 85 over the past year and expects to add about 25 more this quarter. “The big ones are sales and product,” Palansky said of the main areas in which the company plans to expand. “We’ve always been a product led company. We’ve always really believed that the best product wins. And so we’ve always invested an outsized amount in product.”
Pictured here: Taiv co-founder and CEO Noah Palansky. At top of post: Taiv’s team taken at a holiday party.
That product sits at the intersection of AI, sports, and retail media.
Taiv installs its own edge hardware in bars, restaurants, and similar venues, using real-time video models to detect commercial breaks and swap in alternative content in under 100 milliseconds. Instead of a national TV spot, viewers might see a drink special, a local event, or a paid ad targeted to the type of audience in the room.
“Our business model is that we purchase all this hardware, and then we install it into restaurants, sports bars, and retail environments,” Palansky said. With demand accelerating, part of the new capital will fund more hardware to keep pace with installations.
The company now works with close to 5,000 venues across North America and has sustained nearly 3x annual growth. Advertisers include T-Mobile, Fox, Google, FanDuel, and Pepsi.
One of Taiv’s latest product pushes is “sports moment targeting,” which allows advertisers to target not just a game, but the emotional context of it.
“We know that they’re showing an NFL game. We know that it’s these two teams. We know that it’s the fourth quarter of the local team is losing and that it’s a close game,” Palansky said. “And then we can actually make all that information available in real time dynamically to advertisers so that they can target that specific state.”
An ad can run when the home team is on the brink, or double down when the crowd is celebrating. It’s real-time, sentiment-aware advertising layered on top of live sports – one of the few formats people still watch together, in person, without skipping.
As Taiv expands nationally, Miami remains part of its origin story as its first U.S. market. But the ambition now is much broader: to turn the commercial break inside every bar into a programmable, measurable media channel.
In Palansky’s words: “Once we have hardware installed and we’re connected to every TV… how can we make this holistically a better experience for every person in our restaurant or bar?”
Black Market bar in downtown Miami
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I am a Miami-based technology researcher and writer with a passion for sharing stories about the South Florida tech ecosystem. I particularly enjoy learning about GovTech startups, cutting-edge applications of artificial intelligence, and innovators that leverage technology to transform society for the better. Always open for pitches via Twitter @rileywk or www.RileyKaminer.com.
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