Ad tech platform Readpeak named Sami Pippuri as chief technology officer, hiring a 25-year engineering veteran with more than a decade at Nokia, time at Microsoft, and a stint as CTO of MaaS Global, the company behind the Whim mobility platform, to run its technology organization through what the company frames as an AI-native rebuild rather than a routine leadership hire.
Readpeak CEO Tomas Forsback described the hire as a deliberate skills match for where the company is headed: “Sami brings 25 years of building and scaling technology internationally, and a genuinely AI-native way of working.” Pippuri will lead product and technology development, scale the ad tech platform, build out the engineering organization, and integrate AI across Readpeak’s products and internal workflows, according to the company. Pippuri himself framed the opportunity in terms of what a smaller, AI-equipped team can now ship: “AI has changed how much a focused engineering team can build, and I want Readpeak to be one of the companies that uses it to great effect.”
The appointment lands alongside a second move, promoting Martin Garfalk to VP of sales for Europe, pairing the technical hire with a commercial one aimed at the same expansion push.
The original insight: this is the second ad tech CTO hire this year explicitly framed around “AI-native” engineering rather than domain-specific ad tech experience, following a pattern where platforms are betting that shipping speed with AI tooling matters more for scaling now than incumbency in programmatic’s older RTB stack. For a mid-sized ad tech vendor competing against much larger DSPs and SSPs, that bet is also a signal to watch for smaller teams outcompeting on release velocity rather than headcount.
Related: ad platforms are becoming analysts, not just dashboards and mobile ad tech’s bet beyond gaming gets its proof.
