This Interview with TechBullion is an insight from Karl Van Buren, co-founder and CEO of Audyence, whose innovative programmatic platform is redefining how advertisers and publishers manage lead generation.
With over a decade of experience leading sales, marketing, and business development at industry leaders like Madison Logic and Spiceworks Ziff Davis, Van Buren recognized critical inefficiencies in traditional lead generation; particularly through content syndication. These challenges inspired the development of Audyence, a ground-breaking platform that allows media and email inventory to be traded on a cost-per-lead basis, offering unparalleled transparency and efficiency.
Audyence has achieved remarkable growth, averaging 84% quarter-over-quarter increases, while partnering with major clients like Veeam, Inovalon, and BitSight. Through programmatic technology, customer-centric strategies, and innovative partnerships (including intent-based targeting with Bombora), Audyence is setting a new standard for lead quality, campaign visibility, and ROI.
Karl Van Buren
Please tell us more about yourself and the solutions you provide at Audyence.
I’m Karl Van Buren, the co-founder and CEO of Audyence. I have over a decade of executive experience in sales, marketing, and business development for leading B2B demand generation and media companies, like Madison Logic and Spiceworks Ziff Davis. My recognition of the gross inefficiencies in B2B lead generation, particularly through content syndication, inspired me to build the first programmatic platform that allows advertisers and publishers to buy and sell media and email inventory on a cost-per-lead basis. Compared to traditional buying and selling content syndication through lead aggregators or brokers, which rely heavily on manual outsourced processes and an obfuscated supply chain, our solutions provide buyers and sellers the power of transparency, control, and hyper-efficiency.
Audyence has achieved remarkable growth since its launch, averaging 84% quarter-over-quarter growth and experiencing significant surges, including a peak of 152% in Q1. What has been the key to sustaining such rapid success, particularly in a highly competitive market?
The key to our sustained growth has been our relentless focus on customer success, innovation, and delivering real solutions to the market. The Audyence team knows this market, and we are laser-focused on solving the unique challenges B2B marketers and publishers face in scaling demand generation while ensuring efficiency and transparency. By combining programmatic technology with unmatched customer support and listening closely to market needs, we’ve built a marketplace ecosystem that addresses pain points head-on. This customer-centric approach and strong data partnerships allow us to continuously refine and adapt to changing market conditions, helping our customers achieve unparalleled results.
Bringing programmatic technology to B2B lead generation is a significant shift. What inspired you to make this bold move, and how has the market responded so far?
The inspiration came from seeing and experiencing years and years of inefficiencies and bottlenecks in B2B lead generation motion that were being addressed and solved in other areas of digital marketing. We saw an opportunity to bring automation, scale, and real-time workflow efficiency to a process that was often manual, opaque, and slow. The market has responded positively, with many clients experiencing improved ROI, faster lead activation, and greater campaign visibility. There is still education to be done, but early adopters have seen the power of a programmatic approach, and that’s driving broader industry acceptance.
Since launch, you have onboarded major clients like Veeam, Inovalon, and BitSight, expanding your customer base by 400%. How do you ensure you continue delivering value to these high-profile clients?
We prioritize a partnership mentality with our customers. That means actively listening to their feedback, understanding their strategic goals, and continuously enhancing our solution to meet their evolving needs. We also invest in customer success teams that provide excellent onboarding, consistent performance reviews, and guidance on how to best leverage the power and convenience of Audyence. Centralizing client outcomes to our operations and leveraging data-driven insights ensures that every interaction and campaign delivers measurable value and aligns with customer KPIs.
Audyence has built strong partnerships to enhance data-driven targeting, like your integration with Bombora. Can you explain how these collaborations enhance your platform’s capabilities and customer outcomes?
Integrating strategic partners like Bombora, arguably the industry’s leading provider of B2B intent data, enables our customers to precisely target in-market accounts with the highest likelihood of converting. By leveraging intent signals, we can offer highly relevant and timely lead generation that aligns with buyer intent. This not only increases conversion rates but also allows our customers to prioritize and nurture leads based on where they are in their purchasing journey. Collaborations like these make our platform more intelligent and enable our customers to focus their efforts where they matter most.
With a 400% customer growth rate and a projected 150-225% revenue increase in 2025, how are you preparing your team and infrastructure to support this scale?
Scaling rapidly while maintaining operational excellence is our top priority. We are strategically investing in hiring, training, and developing talent across all functions—customer success, engineering, operations, and sales. On the technology front, we’re expanding our technology infrastructure to ensure high availability, enterprise-grade data security, and performance at scale. Additionally, we are implementing processes and tools to maintain operational efficiency while preserving the customer-centricity that has been the foundation of our success.
Transparency and efficiency are central to Audyence’s value proposition. How do you maintain these standards, especially as you continue to expand your supply-side partnerships?
Transparency is at the core of Audyence’s value proposition. We uphold transparency by providing all customers, brands, agencies, and publishers with a full view of the entire campaign development and deployment process, including lead source and lead engagement data. Our contracts with supply-side partners reflect our commitment to data integrity and customer success. By integrating robust verification processes and prioritizing reputable partnerships, we maintain quality control and ensure that every lead meets high standards. We aim to bring clarity and control to every stage of the B2B lead generation process, no matter how much we grow.
You’re working to integrate to top Marketing Automation Platforms (MAPs) like Marketo and HubSpot. How will these integrations improve your client’s experience, and what’s next on your integration roadmap?
Integrating with platforms like Marketo, Salesforce, HubSpot, and other MAPs allows our customers to seamlessly sync their leads and associated lead/campaign data, streamlining their workflows and improving lead management. It creates a frictionless experience, reducing time-to-value and enabling customers to act on leads faster with greater personalization. Looking ahead, we are exploring integrations with other CRM systems and analytics platforms to deepen our ability to provide end-to-end campaign visibility and actionable insights.
Audyence is known for its customer-centric technology development. Can you share an example of a feature directly influenced by customer feedback?
One example is our ability to provide customers visibility to landing page metrics. This capability, developed in response to customer feedback, provides insights into how leads interact with campaign assets. It enables brands and agencies to optimize messaging, understand engagement levels, and improve lead quality. This feedback loop from our clients drives continuous improvement and ensures we address real-world challenges.
Looking into the future, what do you see as the biggest opportunities and challenges in the B2B demand generation space, and how is Audyence positioned to capitalize on them?
One of the biggest opportunities is the increasing demand for real-time, data-driven decision-making in lead generation. As buyers become more digitally savvy, marketers need agile solutions that can adapt and personalize at scale—our programmatic platform positions us well to meet this need, offering transparency, speed, and control. The challenge lies in market education and helping businesses transition from legacy methods to more automated and efficient approaches. We are ready to lead that charge, partnering with customers to transform how they create demand, nurture leads, and achieve measurable outcomes.
