About Us

Optimized Markets

  • Optimized Markets, Inc. was founded in 2012 by Dr. Tuomas Sandholm—an eminent professor and serial entrepreneur—to transform advertising inventory allocation and campaign sales using a novel approach powered by ground-breaking optimization technology.
  • The root R&D was conducted at Carnegie Mellon University in his Electronic Marketplaces Laboratory with over $14 million of funding over 14 years.
  • Then he received the prestigious National Science Foundation Accelerating Innovation Research grant in that program’s inaugural year to productize and commercialize the R&D. Optimized Markets has an exclusive worldwide license for the technology from Carnegie Mellon. Optimized Markets also received a selective National Science Foundation Small Business Innovative Research grant in 2014.
  • Optimized Markets, Inc. is a profitable Delaware C-corporation headquartered in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
  • In parallel with his academic career, Dr. Sandholm was Founder, Chairman, and CTO/Chief Scientist of CombineNet, Inc. from 1997 until its acquisition in 2010, at which point he exited. During this time, the company grew to 130 employees and operations on four continents. The company commercialized over 800 of the world’s largest-scale generalized combinatorial markets powered by optimization, with over $60 billion in total spend and over $6 billion in generated savings.
  • Dr. Sandholm and his team have proven in theory and practice that increasing the expressiveness of a market increases economic efficiency.
  • The Optimized Markets team consists of dedicated world-leading experts in optimization, market design, and enterprise software. Almost all members of the team have PhDs from leading programs in computer science or operations research.
  • Dr. Sandholm’s algorithms also run the kidney exchange for the United Network for Organ Sharing. The exchange includes 60% of the transplant centers in the US.
  • Dr. Sandholm served as the redesign consultant of Baidu’s sponsored search auctions. Within two years Baidu’s market cap increased 5x to $50 billion due to doubled monetization. He has also served as consultant to Yahoo! for Internet display advertising market design, and Yahoo! has adopted several of his ideas. He has also consulted for Google, Chicago Board Options Exchange, Netcycler/swap.com, Granata Decision Systems (now Google), Rare Crowds (now Media Math), and others.
  • He has applied his algorithms to develop the reigning two-time world champion Heads’Up No-Limit Texas Hold’em poker programs.