Integral Ad Science Holding Corp.
IAS · New York, NY
Integral Ad Science (IAS) is a privately held ad verification, brand safety, viewability, and attention measurement company founded 2009, NYC-headquartered. Taken private by Canadian PE firm Novacap in a $1.9B all-cash deal that closed December 23, 2025 — no longer publicly traded. CEO Lisa Utzschneider since January 2019. IAS and DoubleVerify form the two-vendor duopoly anchoring independent third-party verification spend across CTV, social, and the open web.
IAS is one of two scaled independent verification vendors that anchor third-party measurement spend across digital media; DoubleVerify is the other. The competitive ledger between them is read at the platform level — which side ships first on a given walled garden, which one carries the MRC stamp on the launched product, and which one wins the renewal at the largest holdco buyers. IAS trailed DoubleVerify by roughly two years on the YouTube viewability MRC accreditation (DV April 2022, IAS March 2024); the April 2026 IAS Total TV launch is its biggest CTV transparency push to date and the cleanest read on how the duopoly will compete for content-level CTV measurement budget heading into the 2026 NewFronts. Novacap’s December 2025 take-private removes IAS from the public-disclosure cycle that has historically forced apples-to-apples comparison with DV; tracking the company now leans more on product launches, MRC accreditations, and partnership announcements than on quarterly prints.