Ad blockers are creating big problems for online publishers, resulting in $41B of lost revenue in 2016, including many Tier 1 publishers in North America and Western Europe. Here enters ChameleonX, a pure-play ad security startup based in Tel Aviv that is laser-focused on securing ad delivery systems and restoring lost revenue.

Founded in 2015 by Maor Hod and Shay Elkana, ChameleonX is a cross-platform security solution that can be deployed into any publisher environment to circumvent ad blockers by encrypting ads and serving them as regular content through the site’s first party domain. The simple to use service only requires a DNS update, meaning that it does not require publishers to add any code to their sites. To ensure that its service is always up-to-date, ChameleonX uses big data and machine learning to detect new ad-blocking methods and deploy automatic updates to publishers’ sites.

In addition, publishers can control their users’ ad experience to provide greater transparency to end users who are deploying ad blocking technology. Visitors to sites are by default served the page with all ads intact, but publishers may provide users the ability to turn off some or all of the ads and provide feedback on why they would prefer certain ads not to be served. In doing so, ChameleonX seeks to not only restore publishers’ capacity to successfully monetize their sites, but restore their users’ trust in the site and its advertisements.

Company Background

• Company: ChameleonX
• Started: 2015
• HQ: Tel Aviv
• VC Raised: Private
• Executives: Maor Hod (CEO) and Shay Elkana (CTO)
• Employee Count: <12
• Product: Ad Security
• Partners: Rackspace, Cloudflare, Google Cloud and AWS

Feature Set

• Ad restoration for display, native, and video ads
• Protection against malvertising
• Zero Integration SaaS
• Automatic updates
• Bot detection and mitigation