Jun 22, 2023
Omar Tawakol is CEO and co-founder Rembrand, a company using generative AI to automate product placement in online videos. Earlier this year, he announced an $8 million seed funding round and this month added several more strategic investors.
Rembrand represents a return to Tawakol's roots in advertising technology and his graduate work in AI. He saw there was an underutilized opportunity for product placement at scale that could be delivered cost-effectively for online influencers. AI is enabling the company to significantly expand the market.
Tawakol was my guest for Episode 61, in 2018. At the time, he was CEO of Voicera, which later rebranded to Voicea and then was acquired by Cisco 2019. Voicea was an early leader in the automated meeting transcription space and pioneered novel architectures that led to rapid increases in performance. Earlier in his career, Tawakol was CEO of Blue Kai, the leading DMP for enterprise marketers. The company was acquired by Oracle in 2016 and he then served as SVP of Oracle Data Cloud. He was formerly a board director at PlaceIQ and is a board member for Liveramp.