Startup Deep Dive : Silverpush — the adtech firm that survived an FTC crackdown over secret audio tracking

Silverpush turns over roughly ₹386 crore (about $40 million) a year telling advertisers it can read a video frame by frame and place an ad only where it truly fits. Fourteen years ago its pitch to the same advertisers rested on something else entirely: inaudible sounds hidden in TV audio that let a phone secretly confirm you were watching, a technique the United States Federal Trade Commission moved to shut down in 2016.

The company survived that reckoning, rebuilt around what it now calls contextual intelligence, and grew revenue by close to 120% in FY24 before growth nearly stalled and profit flipped into an ₹17.6 crore loss in FY25. This is the story of how a Delhi-and-Singapore adtech firm went from covert audio beacons to a listed-client roster that includes Samsung and Coca-Cola, and why its newest pitch — a cookieless future — has just had the ground shift under it.

Quick facts

What they do

Silverpush sells advertisers and media agencies a way to place video ads next to content that actually matches the ad, without relying on a viewer’s browsing history or third-party cookies. Its flagship platform, Mirrors, uses computer vision and natural-language processing to scan video frame by frame — logos, faces, objects, spoken words, scene mood — and match brand-safe, contextually relevant slots across YouTube, connected TV (CTV), TikTok, Meta and the open programmatic web. Clients disclosed across its funding announcements and press coverage since 2014 include Samsung, Ford, Nestle, Coca-Cola, Domino’s, Airtel and agency network GroupM.

The origin

Hitesh Chawla, an IIT Delhi engineering graduate who had worked as a research associate at the University of Michigan, a research scientist at the University of New South Wales, and an analyst at Evalueserve, had already tried and failed once as an entrepreneur with an earlier venture, Wiseassist Technologies, before he founded Silverpush in 2012 with Mudit Seth and Alex Modon. The founding insight was narrow and practical: mobile advertising in 2012 could not tell if the same person was the one seeing an ad on a phone app and again on a mobile browser. Silverpush’s first product built “device personas” from fingerprinting data pooled across ad exchanges, working from a claimed database of more than 200 million unique devices to stitch identity across a fragmented mobile web, according to a 2014 profile of the company’s launch strategy.

The struggle years

The company’s telling of its own early mistakes, given years later by Chawla, centres on a basic strategic error: trying to build in India and the United States at the same time. The two markets, he said, turned out to run on entirely different playbooks — the US wanted mature, self-serve platforms; India needed groundwork and relationship-led sales — and running both burned through capital fast enough that the company had to abandon the parallel push and concentrate on its home market before trying the US again.

The bigger crisis came in 2016, and it was existential rather than strategic. Silverpush’s core cross-device tracking product depended on “Unique Audio Beacons”: ultrasonic tones, inaudible to humans, embedded in TV commercials and picked up by a software development kit sitting inside partner apps, silently confirming which television households were exposed to which ads. By April 2015 the company said 67 apps carried that SDK. Privacy researchers and the Center for Democracy and Technology flagged the technique to US regulators, and academic teams at UCL, UC Santa Barbara and elsewhere showed the same ultrasonic tracking approach could be abused to de-anonymise users, including on the Tor network. On 17 March 2016 the Federal Trade Commission sent warning letters to twelve app developers using Silverpush’s code, saying users had never been told their apps could listen for these signals or that a phone’s microphone could be triggered even when the app was not in use. Within weeks Silverpush said publicly it had “exited from all UAB based business” — walking away from the product line the company had been built around.

The turning point

The turning point is that same FTC episode, because of what had to happen afterwards rather than the letters themselves. Before March 2016, Silverpush’s entire pitch to advertisers was audio-beacon cross-device tracking, embedded, by its own count, in dozens of apps reaching an unstated but evidently large install base. After it, the company had no product to sell and a regulator’s public rebuke attached to its name. Chawla shut the audio-tracking business down and rebuilt Silverpush around contextual video intelligence instead — watching and classifying the content itself rather than eavesdropping on the viewer. It took roughly three years to ship the first fruits of that pivot: Parallels, a real-time ad-sync product, in April 2019, and Mirrors, the AI in-video context engine, in November 2019. By FY24, the rebuilt business was reporting close to 120% year-on-year revenue growth to ₹347 crore, as later disclosed in regulatory filings reported by Entrackr — a scale the old audio-beacon business never approached in public disclosures.

The money behind it

• Seed, closing around early-to-mid 2014: reported at $1.5 million, with early backing from the 500 Startups accelerator (now 500 Global) and Delhi-based seed fund GSF India, alongside angel investors including Fabrice Grinda and K. Ganesh, per Wikipedia’s sourced timeline and a contemporaneous AdExchanger profile.
• Series B, announced 19 February 2019: $5 million led by Japanese martech firm FreakOut Holdings, per DealStreetAsia and FreakOut-linked investor TA Ventures; data platform Tracxn separately lists this round at $8.01 million — the two figures conflict and both are given here. FreakOut’s stated goal was funding Silverpush’s push into Hong Kong, Australia and South Korea and broadening its AI beyond advertising.
• Series C, announced November 2022: ₹95 crore (about $12 million; JM Financial’s own release states INR 950 million), led by JM Financial Private Equity’s India Growth Fund III, with Ashish Kacholia, Mirabilis Investment Trust and Seven Hills Capital co-investing, confirmed by both JM Financial’s press release and a PRNewswire announcement. The company said the capital would fund global expansion, inorganic growth and tripling headcount.
• Cumulative funding: named, dated rounds above add up to roughly $18.5 million; aggregator Tracxn separately estimates total funding at $22.7 million across seven rounds from about 50 investors as of its most recent count — a company-unconfirmed, single-source figure included here for context only.

Silverpush has not disclosed a valuation for any round. Tracxn’s shareholding data references further investor activity dated October 2025 with the amount withheld; because that has not been corroborated by a second source or confirmed by the company, it is not treated as fact here.

How it makes money

• Money in: fees from brands and media agencies for running campaigns through Mirrors (contextual targeting), Parallels (real-time ad synchronisation to live “moments”) and a fraud-detection layer, typically billed against media spend Silverpush plans and places on the client’s behalf.
• Money out: the largest cost line by far is what Entrackr’s FY25 filing analysis calls cost of sales — cloud infrastructure, third-party data and media buying costs — at ₹233 crore, or 63% of FY25’s ₹368 crore total expenses. Employee benefits came next at ₹77 crore (21%).
• Where the margin sits: thin. FY25 EBITDA was negative ₹9.45 crore, an EBITDA margin of about -2.5% on ₹386 crore of revenue, per Entrackr’s analysis of the company’s filings.
• What people get wrong: Silverpush is often filed away as an “AI adtech SaaS” company. The cost structure says otherwise — nearly two-thirds of expenses are pass-through media and infrastructure costs, which is closer to a managed ad-buying and technology-services model than a high-margin software business, and it explains why fast revenue growth in FY24 did not protect the FY25 bottom line.

The numbers

FY23 absolute revenue was not found in any filing summary or news report opened for this piece, so it has been left out rather than backed into by dividing FY24’s growth rate; only the reported FY24 YoY growth figure (~120%) is used above.

Where the money comes from

• By channel, per the company: Silverpush’s own site states its platform has processed more than 200 billion ad requests, analysed over 33 billion CTV impressions, connected to more than 10,000 premium CTV publishers and contextually mapped more than 25 million YouTube videos, reaching over 300 million unique users — company-stated figures, undated, as displayed on its site in September 2026, with no independent audit found.
• By geography, historically: as of a 2014 profile the company served roughly 30 clients across India, Singapore, Germany, the Philippines, Argentina and Brazil while explicitly chasing the more mature US market; by its November 2022 funding announcement it described a presence across Southeast Asia, the Middle East, Africa, the US, the UK and India.
• By client type: named clients across its public disclosures span large consumer brands directly (Samsung, Ford, Nestle, Coca-Cola, Domino’s, Airtel) and media agencies (GroupM), suggesting revenue is split between direct-brand and agency-mediated business, though no percentage split has been disclosed.
• The surprise: for a company whose original scandal was about listening in on individual households, its current stated scale is entirely aggregate and content-side — billions of ad requests and video-content classifications, not individual user profiles — a structural difference from the 2016-era product that the company leans on in its own marketing.

The risks

• Its central sales pitch just lost urgency: Silverpush has marketed contextual targeting for years as the answer to an imminent “cookieless future.” Google abandoned its plan to deprecate third-party cookies in Chrome on 22 July 2024, confirmed by reporting from The Register and an industry analysis from Forrester, after years of delays and pushback from advertisers and the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority. Third-party cookies remain available in Chrome for the foreseeable future, undercutting the deadline-driven argument Silverpush has used in fundraising and client pitches, even as independent privacy-regulation pressure (see below) keeps some of the underlying demand alive.
• Thin, volatile margins built on pass-through costs: with cost of sales at 63% of FY25 expenses and EBITDA margin around -2.5%, Silverpush’s profitability swings sharply with media and cloud costs it does not fully control; FY24’s ₹6 crore profit reversed into a ₹17.6 crore loss the very next year even as revenue kept growing, per Entrackr’s review of its FY25 filings.
• A regulatory and reputational overhang from its own history: the 2016 FTC action over covert audio-beacon tracking, and the 2015 Center for Democracy and Technology complaint that preceded it, sit in the public record permanently under the Silverpush name. That history lands in a tightening regulatory environment: India notified its Digital Personal Data Protection Rules, 2025 on 14 November 2025, formally operationalising the 2023 Act with phased compliance obligations for exactly the kind of data-driven ad-tech business Silverpush runs, per the Press Information Bureau’s own notification and Wikipedia’s tracking of the rules.

The takeaway

Silverpush’s real asset was never the audio beacon or the SDK footprint; it was the willingness to walk away from a product that regulators had made toxic and rebuild the entire company around a defensible version of the same idea — understanding what content is on screen, rather than spying on who is watching it. That is a transferable lesson beyond adtech: when a business model’s core technique becomes a liability, the fastest route back to growth is not defending the old technique but keeping the underlying customer problem and finding a version of the solution that survives scrutiny. The FY25 wobble is a reminder that surviving one reckoning does not immunise a company from the next one — margin discipline and a pitch no longer anchored to a regulatory deadline that failed to arrive are now Silverpush’s open questions.

Frequently asked questions

What does Silverpush do today?

It sells AI-based contextual video advertising technology, primarily through its Mirrors platform, which scans video content to place brand-safe ads next to relevant scenes across YouTube, connected TV, TikTok, Meta and the open web, without relying on third-party cookies or individual user tracking.

Is Silverpush the same company involved in the “audio beacon” tracking controversy?

Yes. Silverpush built and marketed the “Unique Audio Beacon” cross-device tracking technology that drew a March 2016 FTC warning to app developers using its code; the company says it exited that business entirely afterwards and rebuilt around contextual, content-side technology instead.

How much money has Silverpush raised, and who backs it?

Publicly confirmed, dated rounds add up to roughly $18.5 million: a 2014 seed round (~$1.5 million), a February 2019 Series B ($5 million, reported by some sources as up to $8.01 million) led by FreakOut Holdings, and a November 2022 Series C (₹95 crore, about $12 million) led by JM Financial Private Equity with Ashish Kacholia, Mirabilis Investment Trust and Seven Hills Capital. Aggregator Tracxn puts cumulative funding higher, at $22.7 million, a figure not independently confirmed.

Is Silverpush profitable?

Not consistently. It reported a ₹6 crore net profit in FY24 but swung to a ₹17.6 crore net loss in FY25 even as revenue grew 11-12% to roughly ₹386 crore, according to Entrackr’s review of the company’s regulatory filings.

Is Silverpush listed on a stock exchange?

No. It remains a privately held company, with its India entity registered as Silveredge Technologies Private Limited and its parent, Silverpush Pte Ltd, based in Singapore; no IPO has been announced.

Sources

Figures are as of September 2026. Currency converted at $1 ≈ ₹96.0 as of 18 September 2026 (Trading Economics).

• Federal Trade Commission, “FTC Issues Warning Letters to App Developers Using ‘Silverpush’ Code,” March 2016
• Wikipedia, “SilverPush” (timeline of founding, funding rounds and product launches), accessed September 2026
• Techdirt, “Silverpush Stops Using Sneaky, Inaudible TV Audio Tracking Beacons After FTC Warning,” March-April 2016
• Forbes, “Silverpush Quits Creeping World Out, Ceases Tracking TV Habits Via Inaudible ‘Beacons’,” March 2016
• AdExchanger, “India-Based Mobile Startup SilverPush Takes Aim At US Marketers,” January 2014
• KrASIA, “Hitesh Chawla of SilverPush, Immersion in the market: Startup Stories,” 2021
• YourStory, profile of Hitesh Chawla, accessed September 2026
• DealStreetAsia, “SG-based marketing tech platform SilverPush raises $5m in Series B,” February 2019
• TA Ventures, press release on Silverpush Series B funding, February 2019
• JM Financial Limited, press release on JM Financial Private Equity’s INR 950 million investment in Silveredge Technologies, November 2022
• PRNewswire, “Silverpush Raises $12M in Series-C Funding, Expands its Cookieless Solutions to the US,” November 2022
• Entrackr, “SilverPush growth stalls in FY25; slips into red with Rs 18 Cr loss,” September 2025
• TheCompanyCheck, Silveredge Technologies Private Limited company financial profile, accessed September 2026
• Tracxn, Silverpush company profile (funding, valuation and shareholding data), accessed September 2026
• ExchangeWire, “Silverpush Releases Trend Intelligence Platform to Transform Real-Time Trends into Contextual Signals for Advertising,” January 2026
• Silverpush.co, company website (product statistics and client claims), accessed September 2026
• The Register, “Google abandons plan to drop third-party cookies in Chrome,” July 2024
• Forrester, “Google Finally Scraps Its Cookie Deprecation Plans,” July 2024
• Press Information Bureau, Government of India, “DPDP Rules, 2025 Notified,” November 2025
• Wikipedia, “Digital Personal Data Protection Rules, 2025,” accessed September 2026

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