Operative Media

Operative Media

Operative Media was founded in 2004 by Gilad Bachar and Becca Steinitz in Jerusalem, Israel. The company grew out of the country's deep pool of ad-tech and enterprise software talent. It later opened a New York office to serve US-based media clients, including major publishers and agencies. The company's flagship product is a cloud-based operating system for advertising operations. It covers inventory management, order entry, campaign trafficking, billing, and reporting. Clients include over 2,000 media companies, from large broadcasters to digital-native publishers, spanning North America and Europe. The platform competes with legacy ad-serving and ERP tools by offering a unified workflow. Operative Media employs several hundred professionals across its two offices. In 2022, the company was acquired by K1 Investment Management, a private equity firm focused on enterprise software. The acquisition provided capital for product development and market expansion. K1 operates as the majority owner, while Bachar and Steinitz remain in leadership roles. The structural differentiator is Operative Media's status as an operating company owned by a private equity sponsor, not a family office. While it functions as a standalone business, the firm's ownership structure ties it to institutional capital from K1. This architecture is distinct from the FO profile norm — the firm is a portfolio company, not an allocator.