Overview

Gender

male

Neal Richter Through 20 years of software experience, Neal has focused on optimizing business needs, successfully applying data mining algorithms and scalable systems in order to create advanced software products.

Most recently he was CTO & Chief Scientist at the Rubicon Project from 2009-2016 (CTO from 2014-2016). Rubicon pioneered “programmatic advertising” and lead early development of real-time bidding via an SSP/Exchange supporting advertising web, mobile and video. Currently the system supports 20B+ ad requests, 500B+ bid requests per day processing 3+ TB in data logs and $2M+ in revenue per day. It connects to 200+ DSPs in total, including large platform DSPs, retargeting DSPs and niche bidders in display, mobile web/app, native and video.

He came into Rubicon when the Engineering team was less than 30 people via their first acquisition of OthersOnline a 4 person startup providing semantic audience analytics software. During his tenure he grew the Engineering team from 100 (after taking over as CTO) to 220 engineers. Neal also serves as co-Chair of the OpenRTB protocol that standardized the process of RTB, the Deal-ID and the Native ads format.

Prior to entering advertising technology he worked at RightNow Technologies, a early CRM vendor that sold to Oracle in 2011. There Neal was the lead of a team of AI/ML engineers doing "data science" before the term was coined. They pioneered the use of sentiment analysis, natural language processing, and content search systems in over 36 languages within automated customer service systems.

Neal grew up in a log cabin in Montana and holds a PhD in Computer Science from Montana State University as well as an MS degree from Utah State University. In grad school he specialized in Artificial Intelligence and optimization algorithms. He authored and published 16 academic papers and 10+ Patents.

When not sifting through data or designing high scale learning algorithms, Neal enjoys fly fishing and living in the Rockies in Salt Lake City Utah.