‘It’s hard to be a sub-billion dollar company’: The investment banker’s diagnosis for ad tech’s public woes

“It’s hard to be a $ sub-billion dollar company, right?,” he said in response to being asked whether all publicly-traded ad tech companies should be taken private. “You’re looking at trying to attract investment dollars from different indices or mutual funds, they often don’t. It’s hard to put real volume into a business that has an $800 million market cap.”

He backed that up with numbers. The basket of publicly-traded ad tech stocks he tracks has underperformed the broader tech one, and multiples have kept declining through 2025 into 2026. Granted, deal activity is picking up, reaching around $14 billion so far this year. But that money is spread across fewer deals than in prior years, meaning the average transaction is getting bigger. Growth, he said, has been the real challenge driving those results. Its that dynamic that leaves many ad tech companies sitting around the $7 billion mark. They’re too small to attract meaningful investment from the index and mutual funds that drive a real public valuation. 

A anecdote from Nick Macshane, founder and senior managing director at investment bank Progress Partners, brought that into sharper focus. His firm has a slide that shows every public ad tech stock from January 1 to now, and it looks less like a market than a Rorschach test. Some companies on it are down 60%, he said during the same conference. Others are up 60%. The ones that were down 60% last year are up 60% this year, and the ones that were up 300% last year are down 60% this year. 

“There’s no rhyme or reason,” he said. The conclusion most people draw looking at that slide, he added, is that these companies shouldn’t be public. 

Maybe, that will change someday. Wepman, for his part, thinks its “doable”. However, “it’s not going to be easy”, he continued. Turning the narrative around from a small-cap position is a tall order, as The Trade Desk’s management team can attest. They’ve watched its stock fall more than 80% since mid-2025 as growth slowed and competition intensified to the point where it is now being dropped from the S&P 500 later this month. 

Sobering as these comments are, it does not mean ad tech as an industry is on life support. If anything, it’s the opposite. Wepman pointed to Criteo, which is rumored to be exploring a take-private deal. Acquirers see real value in businesses trading at fractions of their five-year highs. The same could be said of Doubleverify, LiveRamp and Integral Ad Science, which have all moved off public markets this year through take-private deals. And it’s not just longtime consolidators making moves. Enterprise names like Salesforce, Adobe, ServiceNow and Workday are circling too, alongside newer entrants like Databricks, Snowflake and OpenAI that haven’t been fully factored in yet.  

It’s tempting to read all this as bankers doing what bankers do: talking up the deal pipe; some because deals are how they get paid. That’s probably too cynical here. The stock charts were already a mess before anyone put them on a slide, and the take-privates were already stacking up before anyone needed a reason to talk about them.

Editor’s note. This article has been updated to clarify that Mr Wepman was referring to sub-billion dollar companies, not multi-billion, as the original stated.