Gurbaksh Singh Chahal (born July 17, 1982) is an American internet entrepreneur, philanthropist, and writer.[2] By the age of 25, he founded and sold two advertising companies for a total of US$340 million.
On December 15, 1998, aged 16, Gurbaksh Chahal dropped out of high school to work full-time at his first venture, ClickAgents. ClickAgents was an advertising network focused on performance-based advertising. Two years later, on November 1, 2000, ValueClick announced it agreed to buy ClickAgents in a $40 million all-stock merger.Chahal had a three year non-compete agreement with ValueClick.
On January 12, 2004, Chahal formed BlueLithium. BlueLithium specialized in behavioral targeting of banner advertising (a process that tracks web users’ habits online in order to show ads they are most likely to respond to). The advertising network which was recognized as an innovator in the online advertising space in a Business 2.0 article. In 2006, under Chahal’s leadership, BlueLithium was named Top Innovator by AlwaysOn.
On October 15, 2007, Yahoo! bought Blue Lithium for $300 million in cash. Chahal remained CEO of the company through the transition period.
In September 2009, Chahal started his third online ad company, focused on creating a new category of real-time advertising. On December 1, 2009, it raised its first institutional round of financing totaling $12.5 million from Adam Street Partners, Trinity Ventures, Stanford University and various others. On October 18, 2010, a few days after Chahal’s non-compete expired, the Company re-branded itself as RadiumOne, and launched its Programmatic Advertising Platform that leverages first party data to deliver real-time advertising across the web, including mobile and Facebook. In March 2011, RadiumOne announced it had raised another $21 million in financing which valued the Company at $200 million. On March 2, 2012, RadiumOne’s valuation surpassed $500 million. After Chahal pleaded guilty to Domestic violence battery, there were calls for him to step down as CEO of RadiumOne. He was firedonApril 27, 2014.
