May 28, 2025

Investment Highlight: Upscale AI Investment Highlight: Upscale AI At nvp capital, we’re focused on backing early-stage founders leveraging GenAI to rethink enterprise workflows. When we met the founding team at Upscale AI, it was clear they were doing exactly that — and doing it in a category we know well: video advertising. The Case for Replatforming Creative I started my career at Google working closely with ad products  — and even back then, the holy grail of advertising was to combine dynamic creative with precision targeting to make every message feel personalized. That was easier said than done. At first, even text-based ads struggled with real personalization. Over time, the targeting got smarter, but creative automation lagged behind. After moving into investing, I backed companies in streaming and video delivery. I’ve seen the evolution of this space firsthand – and the consistent roadblock has always been the same: personalized creative is hard to scale. Especially for video. That’s why this moment feels different. The AI tools are finally catching up. For the first time, we can start to automate what used to be entirely manual: creative development, media buying, and performance measurement – especially for video and streaming TV. Upscale Is Making It Real For years, the promise of scalable video personalization has been just that—a promise. Technical complexity, fragmented tooling, and data gaps got in the way. Upscale AI is delivering on that promise. Their platform gives brands the power to build, test, and launch streaming TV campaigns with the kind of speed, iteration, and insight that we’re used to seeing in digital ads. That’s a game-changer, especially for DTC marketers who want the performance mindset of digital in a TV format. Built by Founders Who’ve Lived the Problem This level of innovation doesn’t happen by accident. It happens when the right team shows up with domain expertise, product intuition, and great timing. The Upscale founding team—Herman, Kevin, Mike, and Seth—are all repeat founders with backgrounds in martech, adtech, and creative tooling. They’ve lived the pain points and now they’re building a platform that directly solves them.What makes Upscale AI especially exciting isn’t just the AI infrastructure, but the clear, verticalized wedge: helping DTC brands deploy video and TV ads the same way they deploy ads — with flexibility, iteration, and measurable results. That’s a radical unlock in a category long held back by creative bottlenecks and fragmented tooling. Defining the Future of AI-Native TV Ads We believe Upscale has the potential to define what AI-native TV advertising looks like—not just for DTC brands, but for any performance-minded business looking to bridge digital and television. That’s why we’re so excited to share that nvp capital has co-led Upscale’s $5.5M seed round, alongside our friends at Eniac and M12 (Microsoft’s Venture Fund). Let’s go, Upscale! We’re thrilled to be part of the journey.