Samba TV acquires Bestever AI to scale autonomous agentic advertising

The acquisition marks a pivot from simple workflow automation to autonomous 'agentic' advertising, where AI agents make real-time optimization decisions based on massive first-party datasets. By combining Bestever’s creative generation with Samba's deterministic viewing data, the company is positioning itself as an alternative to the 'black-box' optimization engines of major walled gardens. For the broader ecosystem, this signals a consolidation of AI-driven creative and performance analytics into single-vendor stacks that prioritize speed and cross-platform personalization. Watch for Samba to integrate these agents into its recently launched Project Gravity to offer unified activation across more than 40 advertising platforms.

The acquisition follows Samba's June 2026 launch of Project Gravity, a platform designed to resolve viewer identity across 40 disparate advertising environments. Per Demand Gen Report, the system is specifically tuned for a new class of AI agents capable of making thousands of media-buying decisions per second. This shift toward autonomy is gaining momentum as market data suggests traditional linear TV audience loyalty is evaporating; a June 2026 Samsung Ads report noted that just 22% of viewers now drive 97% of all linear consumption. Consequently, advertisers are increasingly turning to agentic tools to manage the complexity of fragmented streaming and FAST environments where attention is harder to maintain.

Competitive pressure from social platforms entering the living room is also intensifying the need for sophisticated AI targeting. Per TechCrunch and The Next Web, Meta expanded Instagram for TV to Samsung Smart TVs in June 2026, introducing episodic series and horizontal video formats to compete directly with streaming services for big-screen ad budgets. By acquiring Bestever, Samba aims to provide brands with the technical agility to compete against these social giants using performance-driven creative that adjusts in real-time. This deal reflects a broader industry trend toward 'Media Intelligence,' where companies use deep-tier audience data to replace manual planning with automated, intent-based indexing, as evidenced by similar product launches from Verve and Smartly during the same period in 2026.