Founder Friday spotlights the people behind the SuperAngel.Fund portfolio.
Streaming TV has exploded, but most brands still can’t advertise, measure and optimize it the way they do with Facebook or Google ads.
In our 62nd edition, meet Herman Yang, Kevin Weatherman, Mike Chang and Seth Yates, co-founders of Upscale AI, an AI-powered performance marketing platform for streaming TV.
The team brings deep experience across advertising and technology. Herman previously led product at Moloco and Twitter’s programmatic advertising business. Kevin held leadership roles at MoPub and OneSignal. Mike held product roles at Google and Salesforce, while Seth previously held engineering roles at Microsoft and Salesforce.
As paid social becomes saturated, acquisition costs rise and brands need new growth channels. Streaming TV offers massive reach, but producing ads is expensive, measurement is difficult and campaigns are slow to optimize.
Upscale lets brands run streaming TV campaigns the same way they run digital ads.
Its platform uses AI to create video ads, launch campaigns, optimize performance in real time and measure results across channels.
With the U.S. streaming advertising market exceeding $30 billion annually, the opportunity is enormous.
Last year, Upscale announced $5.5 million in financing from investors including Eniac, NVP Capital and M12, Microsoft’s venture fund.
See what Herman, Kevin, Mike and Seth have to say in this week’s Q&A 👇
*Upscale is a SuperAngel.Fund I and II portfolio company
Describe your company in 5 words or less.
Herman: AI performance marketing platform for streaming.
Kevin: Streaming TV performance ads platform.
Mike: Quality TV ads for brands.
Seth: Performance creative operating system.
What was your primary motivation for starting your business?
Herman: We started Upscale AI to help fast-growing brands tap into streaming—CTV, YouTube, and more—as a performance marketing channel. Personally, I love working with brands that have a unique ethos and innovative products, and in many ways, operate like startups themselves. I enjoy helping them leverage AI and other technologies to drive real business results. Ultimately we’re helping the brands reach consumers through more personalized storytelling, which requires both understanding the ins and outs of a complicated ecosystem as well as creativity.
Kevin: Opportunity to help brands scale while using cutting-edge AI and being able to work with amazing cofounders and investors.
Mike: Huge need for brands around creatives and how they engage with their customers on the home’s largest screen. A solution that makes it easy to do for any brand, backed by data and AI, felt like a no-brainer.
Seth: Creative was the last unautomated part of advertising. We’ve spent twenty years getting precise about who sees an ad and whether it worked, but the ad itself still comes from a shoot that takes weeks and costs a fortune.
What new product/feature are you most excited about and why?
Herman: I’m really excited about something we’ve been investing in quite a bit recently - which is our technology which uses multiple agents to do deep creative optimization. Our platform is unique in that we have the ability to generate high-quality streaming video creatives and access the raw performance data from running streaming campaigns for our brands. Our creative optimization AI not only can analyze what specific features or attributes of a creative drove a certain performance outcome and suggest improvements, but we can then produce new creatives based on those insights!
Kevin: Launch with Upscale for helping brands launch new products with TV, excited because it works!
Mike: The ever-growing quality of the TV creatives we produce is always exciting to see, especially when I see it watching my favorite shows.
Seth: The part I’m most excited about isn’t just generating creative, it’s closing the loop. We can produce many variants of an ad, then actually attribute performance back to the creative features that drove it, so the system learns which choices move outcomes rather than just shipping more assets.
What piece of advice would you give an entrepreneur starting a business today?
Herman: A lot has changed given what AI has enabled over the past 6–18 months, but the fundamentals of starting a business remain the same. Spend time deeply understanding your customers and developing empathy for their challenges. Even when you think you understand their pain points, you’re only getting started. Startups are a marathon, not a sprint. While founders make hundreds of decisions every week, it pays to keep an eye on the next major milestone.
Kevin: Choose your co-founders and investors wisely, and make sure the opportunity matches your ambition.
Mike: Figure out the superpower you and your business bring to your customer, and double or triple down on it.
Seth: The boring, legible decision usually wins, and it compounds. Your taste and judgment about what not to build is more of a moat than any feature.
What do you love to do in your free time?
Herman: I love indoor and outdoor activities like tennis, rock climbing and hiking. Beyond that, I can’t say no to a good reality TV dating show although it’s hard to find time to binge them on streaming!
Kevin: Running, scuba, photography, travel, mentoring and angel investing.
Mike: Figuring out if a TV ad or a voiceover in an ad was AI produced.
Seth: Spend time with my kids.
What is the most interesting place you’ve visited recently and why?
Herman: I haven’t been doing as much traveling as I’d like but I always discover something new and interesting every time I’m in NYC. :)
Kevin: Komodo Islands - Dragons and Scuba - so cool.
Mike: Was able to go to Omega Mart in Vegas recently. Immersive art experience. Was even more interesting because I found out after there’s a storyline, which I didn’t know of while I was there, so an interesting experience was multiplied.
Seth: Tokyo - so many things to explore.
What is your favorite app or tool in your work life and in your personal life?
Herman: Ever since I became a parent I feel like wet wipes (go Biom!) are indispensable and handy in so many situations.
Kevin: Claude Code has been amazing to 100x my ability to work and build products to help our company scale.
Mike: Claude Code and Gemini. Obvious for work, but even on the personal side, was able to navigate the electrical code here in NYC because of them. The problem we solved would not even get an electrician’s attention before.
Seth: Claude Code.
What do you want to be when you grow up (besides a successful founder)? 😊
Herman: I’d like to be a sci-fi novelist at some point in my life.
Kevin: Sub-3-hour marathoner and full-time angel investor.
Mike: Hopefully running a senior dog rescue.
Seth: Peter Pan?
What do you believe is the most important skill or attribute of a successful founder?
Herman: Resilience and humility in equal doses.
Kevin: Ability to listen and take feedback.
Mike: Honesty, with yourself and your team.
Seth: Judgment under ambiguity. Anyone can execute once the path is clear; the job is making good decisions when the information is incomplete and the stakes are real.
Know a founder building something exceptional?
Reply to this email — I’m always looking to meet great entrepreneurs.
SuperAngel.Fund is an early-stage venture capital fund led by Ben Zises that invests in Consumer, PropTech, & Future of Work 😇.
Fund II is backed by the AngelList Systematic Fund-of-Funds (anchored by Sequoia Capital and Squarepoint, a $100B asset manager). Based on their data, SuperAngel ranks in the top 1% on markups over baseline.
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