James Avery

Founder & CEO Kevel

Last Reviewed: September 18, 2026

Executive Summary

James Avery is the founder and Chief Executive Officer of Kevel, an ad serving infrastructure company he incorporated as Adzerk in Durham, North Carolina in 2010 and renamed in 2020. Kevel sells the machinery of ad serving as an API rather than as a finished product: instead of adopting Google’s ad server and accepting its interface, its economics, and its view of the data, a publisher or retailer uses Kevel’s infrastructure to build an ad platform of its own design. That proposition was a difficult one on the open web, where Google’s incumbency was close to absolute, and found its market in retail media, where retailers running their own advertising businesses had every reason not to route them through a competitor. Avery testified in the US government’s ad tech antitrust case against Google.

Career Highlights

• Incorporated Adzerk in Durham, North Carolina in 2010 and has led it since, rebranding to Kevel in 2020.
• Testified in the United States ad tech antitrust trial against Google, from the vantage of a competing ad server.
• Raised $11 million to fund growth of custom in-house ad platforms, announced alongside the 2020 rebrand.
• Won Stack Overflow as an early customer.
• Authored technical books for O’Reilly, Wrox, and Microsoft Press, and co-founded the developer screencast service TekPub.
• Investor and advisor to multiple startups, and a board member of MuukTest.

Professional Journey

Avery is a software engineer by training and reputation, having written books for O’Reilly, Wrox, and Microsoft Press and co-founded TekPub, a service producing high-quality screencasts for developers. That standing in the developer community shaped everything about how his ad company was built and sold.

Kevel’s origin was a failed business rather than a planned one. In the late 2000s Avery acquired a small advertising network serving .NET software developers, and concluded fairly quickly that running an ad network was not a viable enterprise. What was interesting was the infrastructure underneath it. He incorporated Adzerk in Durham, North Carolina in 2010 to sell that machinery instead, initially as a JavaScript-based ad server, then pivoting to a server-side, API-first model — a change that redefined the customer from a marketing team to an engineering team, and the product from a tool to a set of building blocks. Stack Overflow, a company of precisely that engineering-led character, became an early customer.

The strategic difficulty was that the open web ad server market was Google’s. Competing there on equal terms proved untenable, and the company pivoted again, this time toward retail media. The logic was strong: retailers building advertising businesses on their own sites had both the scale to justify custom infrastructure and a structural reason to avoid Google’s stack. Adzerk rebranded as Kevel in 2020, raising $11 million to fund the shift toward custom in-house ad platforms, and positioned itself as the infrastructure layer for companies that wanted to own their advertising technology outright.

Avery’s position as an independent ad server operator eventually gave him a role in the broader reckoning with Google’s market power, and he testified in the US government’s ad tech antitrust trial. Alongside running Kevel he invests in and advises startups and serves on the board of MuukTest.

Education

Education details for this profile could not be established from publicly available sources.