Smartly.io

About Smartly.io

Smartly.io was founded in 2013 in Helsinki by Kristo Ovaska and Tuomo Riekki. The platform combines AI-powered creative automation with programmatic media buying, enabling enterprise marketing teams to produce, test, and optimise thousands of ad variations across social media platforms at scale. The platform serves three core functions: creative automation (generating and adapting ad creatives using AI), media buying (automated bidding and budget allocation across Meta, Google, TikTok, Pinterest, and Snapchat), and campaign intelligence (performance analytics and optimisation recommendations). In 2019, Providence Equity Partners acquired a majority stake for approximately €200 million. The company now employs over 650 people across Helsinki, London, Berlin, New York, and Singapore, with team members from 40+ nationalities. For European businesses, Smartly.io offers a strong data sovereignty posture. The platform is hosted on dedicated servers in Germany (Hetzner) and AWS European regions, with ISO 27001 certification. The company is incorporated in Finland as Smartly.io Solutions Oy, operating under Finnish and EU law. Cross-border data transfers to non-EU offices are covered by EU Standard Contractual Clauses. The company uses Meta Llama 3 deployed on-premises for its internal AI customer support, demonstrating a preference for controllable, self-hosted AI models. However, the company's privacy policy does not explicitly address whether advertising campaign data is used for model training—a transparency gap worth noting for compliance teams.