Public ad tech's problem is size, not performance

Public ad tech is disappearing, and an investment banker just explained why. Josh Wepman, managing director of technology investment banking at Houlihan Lokey, told ExchangeWire's ATS London conference it is a size problem, not a performance one: most public ad tech companies sit at market caps too small for the funds that move real money. "It's hard to be a $7 billion company, right?... You're looking at trying to attract investment dollars from different indices or mutual funds... It's hard to put real volume into a business that has an $800 million market cap." The basket of public ad tech stocks he tracks has underperformed broader tech, and multiples kept declining through 2025 into 2026. Nick Macshane, founder and senior managing director at Progress Partners, said his firm's slide of every public ad tech stock from January 1 to now "looks less like a market than a Rorschach test... There's no rhyme or reason." The Trade Desk is down more than 80% since mid-2025 and gets dropped from the S&P 500 later this month. But deal activity is picking up, around $14 billion so far this year across fewer, bigger transactions, with Criteo rumored to be exploring a take-private and DoubleVerify, LiveRamp and Integral Ad Science already gone private this year. Enterprise names like Salesforce, Adobe, ServiceNow, Workday, plus Databricks, Snowflake and OpenAI, are circling.

The crux

Ad tech is consolidating not because the businesses are broken but because they are too small for public markets to price properly, and take-private buyers and enterprise software giants see value the public markets will not assign.

Sell-side read

For publishers this means fewer, bigger supply-side counterparties. Track who actually owns your SSP and DSP relationships through the consolidation wave, because a change of control can quietly shift yield terms and data access.

Watch

The Criteo take-private outcome, and whether The Trade Desk's S&P 500 exit triggers index-fund forced selling that further depresses the sector's comps.