While you may not know the name Taiv, chances are you’ve seen their product in use if you’ve visited any sports bar in Winnipeg or America recently.
This advertising technology company allows restaurants, or any privately owned business that uses TV screens, to essentially replace commercials that are slated to be broadcasted with customizable ads cast by a Taiv box.
“The only place that I'm aware of, where someone owns screens and eyeballs, and plays advertising to their customers that doesn’t make the money from it are bars and restaurants,” said Avi Stoller, chief business officer for Taiv.
“But we're changing that.”
Working for both restaurants and advertisers
For restaurants it’s great, as they can control who is advertising in their space, while also earning a share of the ad revenue Taiv sells. As well, restaurants use Taiv to promote specials and events, which has proven to lift sales.
For advertisers using Taiv, they are buying into a hyper-targeted market that you’d be hard pressed to find anywhere else.
“We've built the ability to control and sell the ad space during live sports in bars and restaurants, so that these brands can access live sports in a new way that's more targeted, more measurable,” said Stoller.
“It's the same premium advertising that everybody is looking for, but hard to access normally.”
One of Canada’s fastest growing companies
Taiv was co-founded in 2018 by CEO Noah Palansky, chief technology officer Jordan Davis, and Stoller. The startup is currently ranked the 4th fastest growing company in Canada on Deloitte's Technology Fast 50, with revenue growth of more than 1,700 per cent over the last three years, and 2-3x growth each year since inception.
This summer they announced $14.4 million in Series A funding, with more than $26 million total funding raised to date. Both Palansky and Davis were also just named to the Forbes 30 Under 30 Class of 2026 in the category of marketing and advertising.
Taiv currently has 80 full-time employees, after starting the year with just 30. They estimate a workforce of around 100 to close out the year between programmers, product development (firmware, software and hardware engineering), sales and marketing. Of that workforce, 80 per cent are based in Winnipeg.
Over 3,500 locations, representing both chains and unique local spots, currently use a Taiv box — which attaches to regular cable boxes or TVs –– for their in-house advertising. Taiv’s current advertising audience is 15 million viewers each month. “We have extremely high customer retention, like north of 99 per cent,” said Palansky. “That's predominantly month-to-month contracts where people could be canceling at any time, and they don't.”
Customers have also helped grow sales, which has been a bonus.
“What's actually better than that, they [our restaurant customers] make a bunch of referrals,” said Palansky. “And we have a really high rate of customers telling their friends about why they should sign up with a product, which is amazing to see.”
The idea
“We came up with the idea for Taiv when I was sitting in a bar,” said Noah Palansky. “I was out for drinks with my now wife, and we were watching a hockey game. They cut to a commercial break and we saw them running a national ad for Boston Pizza, promoting beer that was cheaper at Boston Pizza than it was at this local bar.”
“I thought, there has to be a better way. We should be able to promote local specials, local events, local businesses, increase the revenue of that local establishment, and also drive traffic to nearby businesses. And that was kind of the core idea behind Taiv,” continued Palansky.
From there, they had to build the actual device that could stream these customizable ads.
“We were really gung-ho about developing the technology to make this possible,” said Jordan Davis.
“We dove in right away and we spent many, many months working all-nighters in a basement, building the first prototypes... doing the R&D and building our own hardware from scratch, and developing the AI behind it,” continued Davis.
What’s crazy is, as Stoller explains, both Palansky and Davis come from software backgrounds, and they managed to build a piece of hardware — the Taiv broadcast box — that no one in the world had done before.
Who is using Taiv (and why)
They first launched in Winnipeg, with the business quickly expanding in the US. Right now, Chicago is the largest market for restaurant clients, with the most advertising clients currently coming from New York. They are currently working with more than 150 advertising brands.
Given that the Taiv box switches out commercials that are slated to play during a broadcast, you’d assume that big advertising brands and television networks wouldn’t approve. But that’s not the case.
As Stoller explained, companies like Fox and ESPN use them to circumvent each other's ad spaces, while countless big brands from airlines to beer companies and food companies are all using Taiv to hit their target audiences.
Locally, and in other smaller markets, realtors also love to use Taiv for marketing, as do HVAC companies, snow removal and lawn service companies, as your audience is so much more engaged then say, a bus bench.
For restaurant and bar owners, there’s also the idea that they can monetize their ethics.
“The big value for them is being able to choose and make money from the ads they choose to show,” said Palansky. “From an ethical perspective, we now have the ability to make sure that ads are only shown to the audiences that should actually see them.”
As to blocking ads, Palansky cites people who don’t want to show sports betting ads, businesses that don’t want to show politics or political ads, or specifically, people who don’t want to see a particular commercial repeatedly.
Proudly Winnipeg, where talent is continually being developed
Palansky, Stoller and Davis are all born and raised in Winnipeg and are proud to see Taiv adding to the local economy, while also showcasing how this city can produce great tech companies.
“One of the most amazing parts about being based here in Winnipeg, and having most of our employees come from this market, is that we have a relatively large city and a really strong talent pool,” said Stoller.
“Especially on the engineering side,” said Davis. “We're a very engineering focused and forward company, where we develop a lot of really challenging and cool, hard tech. So having such a deep and rich talent pool of engineering talent has been huge for us.”
In their last hiring round, they had 700 applicants representing mainly computer science graduates and students from the University of Manitoba. As Palansky points out, that’s an absurd number for a city of 800,000.
The founders attribute this to word-of-mouth in the tight tech community here, along with the culture they’ve created in their downtown office at 311 Portage Avenue. (In fact, we chatted with two of their latest hires from U of M in the common area, and they said everyone in tech on campus knows of Taiv, as it’s the place where so many students are looking to work upon graduation.)
“Something amazing about the company we built is the culture –– everybody is in it to see the company succeed,” said Palansky. “I think a lot of that comes down to giving employees equity and ownership in the company, but also just the team environment.”
“Even in a sales role, where you would assume people are individually motivated by commission. Every person on the team will happily spend hours helping a new person get up to speed to sacrifice their own commission for the greater good,” said Palansky.
"We created a really great environment where everybody lifts each other up and everybody's growing in the same direction. That's something I'm really proud of.”
The three founders also note that Taiv’s impressive and expedient growth is putting a new spotlight on tech in the city, one that they are proud to help drive, notes Stoller.
“We're now at a spot where we've successfully been able to convince other people that aren't even based in Winnipeg, to come move here, to come join Taiv and accelerate their career, which has been really inspiring to see.”
