James Avery

James Avery is best known as the founder and CEO of Kevel, an ad serving infrastructure company that provides APIs enabling businesses to build fully custom ad servers, sponsored listings, and retail media networks without relying on walled garden platforms like Google or Amazon. His work has been central to the movement to democratize ad tech infrastructure, giving publishers, retailers, and marketplaces the tools to own and control their own advertising stacks. Avery founded the company in 2010 as Adzerk, bootstrapping it before rebranding to Kevel in 2020 to better reflect its API-first, infrastructure-focused positioning. Over more than a decade, he has grown Kevel into a recognized platform in the retail media and custom ad serving space, serving major retailers and digital publishers seeking to launch or scale first-party ad programs. Beyond operating Kevel, Avery is a prolific writer and speaker on topics including ad blocking, the economics of digital advertising, retail media trends, and the technical architecture of ad serving. He has been a vocal advocate for the open web and a critic of practices that consolidate power within dominant tech ecosystems, giving him a distinctive dual role as both operator and industry commentator.

• CEOCurrent

  Kevel

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