Shreyas Sathe, CEO & MD of Hybrid INSEA, on building a profitable, privacy-first programmatic business across India and Southeast Asia
When Shreyas Sathe flew back to India from Germany in early 2020 for what was meant to be a short break, he didn’t expect to build a company out of it. But COVID grounded his flights and left him, like most of the world – staring down a wall of uncertainty.
With strong support from global founders, he decided to build anyway, as historical records have shown that, irrespective of any global crisis, India comes out to be a strong market.
“I thought this is a great time to start the Indian venture for Hybrid,” Sathe recalls in this episode of Spotlight by Hybrid, MediaBrief’s special podcast series in partnership with Hybrid. “I got support from my global founders based out of Berlin, and we started Hybrid India in a small six-by-six-feet room, just a laptop, Wi-Fi, and the spirit that I want to grow Hybrid India.”
Six years on, that room has become five offices across India and a footprint spanning Indonesia, Thailand, Vietnam and Singapore – a rare growth story built almost entirely without external capital.
From Two People to Fifty, Without Outside Funding
Hybrid India started with two employees and grew, in Sathe’s words, “slowly and steadily.” The company deliberately avoided the hire-fast-fire-fast approach common in ad tech, instead targeting tier-2 and tier-3 agencies first and building out office by office, Mumbai, then Delhi, then beyond.
“We had hardly any VC funding,” he says. “In the first three months itself, we got a positive ROI. That was our first milestone. It gave us confidence that we had the right strategy, the right people, and the right service for a moment when there were no feet on the ground but digital was really empowering businesses.”
That capital discipline has stayed a core part of the culture. Hybrid India is now fully self-funded and in turn funds Hybrid’s expansion into Southeast Asia.
“Hybrid India is self-funded, and we are supporting Hybrid Indonesia, Vietnam, and so on. It’s a self-sustaining ecosystem, and we’re quite proud of it,” Sathe explains. The trade-off, he admits candidly, is pace: “We cannot expand drastically and rapidly anywhere. It’s a steady pace, which is a good thing – but on the other side, when my CEO mind wants to do something drastic, our hands are sometimes tied.”
The Contextual Bet That Predated Google’s Cookie Deadline
If self-funded discipline is one pillar of Hybrid’s story, contextual advertising is the other – and it’s the one Sathe is most animated about.
Hybrid built its contextual advertising suite back in 2019, well before Google’s cookie deprecation plans and Apple’s iOS 11+ privacy changes forced the rest of the industry to scramble for alternatives to third-party data.
“Google wanted to go cookie-less. Everyone was talking about using data in a much more secure way. There was a lot of uncertainty,” Sathe says. “We launched our contextual suite and did everything contextually, without relying on a lot of data. Brands were impressed, publishers were impressed and it was the right thing to do.”
Asked to break contextual targeting down simply, Sathe distinguished it from the keyword-matching most marketers are already familiar with:
“Semantic is keyword targeting – Google’s been doing that for ages. Contextual is different. We scan the image inside the article, we pull the keywords out of the article, and we match that context – we can even recognise emotions, dog breeds, brands. It’s a very precise algorithm. It gives us close to 100% brand safety – I’d say 99.99%, to be on the safe side.”
The example he gives is a useful one for anyone still fuzzy on the concept: an image of a parent holding a baby could sit next to an article about parenting – or one about a refugee crisis. Contextual targeting is built to tell the difference, and place ads accordingly, without ever touching personal data.
That architecture has turned out to be a strategic hedge against a decade of tightening privacy regulation. “When it comes to evolving privacy – GDPR in Europe, iOS changes – it doesn’t affect us the way it affects others, because we’re not in that loop,” Sathe says. “We have first-party data, we do contextual targeting, we do cross-matching between image and article. Our systems are completely attuned to it.”
Learning to Read Southeast Asia, Market by Market
Hybrid’s expansion into Southeast Asia began in 2021, once the India business had turned profitable – first Indonesia, then Thailand, Vietnam and Singapore.
What struck Sathe most was how differently each market behaves, even within the same region. “Indonesia is hyper-located in Jakarta – most agencies and brands are there, so it’s easier to do business. In Vietnam, government and larger companies sit in Hanoi, while the more interesting startups are in Ho Chi Minh City. Thailand is almost entirely based out of Bangkok,” he says. “We faced a lot of different cultural challenges working across these markets, but it was a good learning for us.”
When evaluating a new market, Sathe says ROI is necessary but not sufficient. Hybrid also weighs a country’s political stability, its trade relationships, the maturity of its local advertising ecosystem, and the depth of its talent pool. India’s talent, he notes, stands out for being genuinely dispersed: “In India, the talent pool is really diverse – people are based even out of tier-2 cities, and they’re really talented.
Global Juries, and a Quiet Worry About the Industry
Sathe’s seat on international advertising juries – including Cannes Lions, White Square and Red Apple – has given him a vantage point on where the industry is heading, and he’s not entirely comfortable with the trend.
“There’s a generic trend around the world of more reliance on AI – not just for targeting, but for copywriting, optimising, reporting,” he says. “The second part is that brands and ads are getting more focused on audience and performance.” He points to industry survey data suggesting a majority of marketers now run every campaign against two objectives – awareness and instant acquisition – rather than one, and argues that performance marketing has increasingly crowded out the kind of long-memory, emotionally resonant advertising that built brands like Fevicol and Amul in India, or that still runs regularly across Europe.
“For these tactical customer acquisitions, emotions are out of the window,” he says. “I’m afraid – what will happen to the generation 10, 20 years from now? I suspect they won’t have this kind of brand recognition. They’ll be more mechanical when they’re buying things. It’s something that worries me a bit – not much, but a bit.”
Building People Who Can Leave
Asked about leadership and legacy, Sathe returns to a lesson from his own early career in Germany, when a manager pulled him aside for staying too late at the office. “He said, ‘Shreyas, is there a problem? Are you not understanding anything?’ He thought I wasn’t working efficiently,” Sathe recalls. “When I started Hybrid India, I wanted to bring that European work culture here – not just sit in the office, but work efficiently, and have a real work-life balance.”
That philosophy extends to how he thinks about talent inside Hybrid. Each year, the leadership team takes a fully offline trip to Turkey – a deliberate test of whether the business can run without them in the room. “It’s not about being indispensable,” he says. “It’s about what we’re building in people, not just what we’re building for them. I want leaders to come out of Hybrid. I don’t want them working here forever – I want them to grow as individuals, to see what the world is like, and to be successful.”
Hybrid, Simplified
Closing out the conversation, Sathe distilled Hybrid’s pitch into a line built for a marketer with thirty seconds to spare: “Relevance over reach.”
“What others offer is reach, but not relevance. When I say relevance, we mean targeting audiences who are actually relevant to the brand,” he says. “Our tech is global, but our soul is local – we don’t just build for one country, we accustom our products to each market we expand into. If you want reach, go to another vendor. If you want relevance, come to Hybrid.”
Asked to define the future of digital marketing in three words based on Hybrid’s own journey, his answer doubled as a summary of the last hour: contextual, AI, and people.
“Contextual is the future because we don’t rely on a lot of data – that helps us in a privacy-safe world. AI is the backbone of everything today. And people – irrespective of how much AI grows, people remain the most important part of a company. They’re the ones who use AI brilliantly well.”
Watch the full conversation between Pavan R. Chawla and Shreyas Sathe above, part of Spotlight by Hybrid – a special podcast series from MediaBrief.com, powered by Hybrid.
