Sandeep Swadia

Board Member, Advisor & Investor Zefr · KKR · Madhive

Last Reviewed: July 28, 2026

Executive Summary

Sandeep Swadia has spent two decades at the center of digital advertising’s data infrastructure — first building it, then policing it, and now advising the investors who fund it. His path from Wall Street equity research to ad-tech C-suite to board rooms across private equity gives him a rare vantage point on how media, data, and trust intersect at scale.

Career Highlights

Swadia’s operating career runs through several of ad-tech’s defining companies. He began as an equity analyst at Jefferies & Company, covering internet and new media, before moving client-side into product marketing and business development at FAST, the enterprise search platform later acquired by Microsoft. From there he took on strategy and business development leadership at Demand Media, served as Chief Revenue Officer at mobile platform ScrollMotion, and became Chief Operating Officer at Magnetic, a data-driven marketing company.

In 2017 he was named CEO of White Ops, the fraud-detection company that later rebranded as HUMAN Security, where he helped lead an industry-wide push against digital advertising fraud. That work led directly to his appointment in 2019 as The Trade Desk’s first Chief Data & Trust Officer, a role focused on improving data quality and consumer trust across the company’s advertising platform — a mandate he held through 2022.

Current Roles

Since stepping back from full-time operating roles, Swadia has built a portfolio of board, advisory, and investment positions. He currently serves as a Board Member at Zefr, focused on applying AI to combat misinformation and improve ad measurement, and as a Capstone Advisor at KKR, working with the firm’s Tech & Growth Equity team on deal evaluation. He is also an investor at Marathon Management Partners and advises a slate of growth-stage companies, including Madhive, Onex, eFuse, Proxima, Level Access, and BLS International Services. Through these roles he works closely with portfolio companies of firms such as KKR, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, and Jefferies, mentoring CEOs of businesses ranging roughly from $40 million to $400 million in revenue.

Education

MIT Sloan School of Management

MBA

Northeastern University

M.S., Mathematics & Computer Science

Beyond the Boardroom

Swadia’s own account of his path is unusually candid for an executive bio: he has described spending part of his teenage years homeless and training as a monk in an ashram before working his way to MIT and eventually the C-suite. He is also a professional musician, having performed close to a thousand concerts across the United States, Europe, India, the Middle East, and Africa. In recent years he has built a fast-growing media presence — a podcast, newsletter, and speaking platform — where he shares perspectives on leadership, growth, and personal reinvention drawn from that trajectory.