Sandeep Swadia

Board Member, Advisor & Investor Independent

Last Reviewed: September 19, 2026

Executive Summary

Sandeep Swadia is an advertising technology executive whose career has concentrated on a single problem: whether the data underneath digital advertising can be trusted. He was Chief Executive Officer of White Ops, now HUMAN, the company that did more than any other to expose and counter automated fraud in digital advertising, and in October 2019 became The Trade Desk’s first Chief Data and Trust Officer — a role the company created rather than inherited, covering data strategy, advertising relevance, and consumer and business trust. He now works across a portfolio of board, advisory and investor positions with growth companies including Zefr and Madhive.

Career Highlights

• Chief Executive Officer of White Ops, now HUMAN, helping drive an industry-wide overhaul of digital advertising fraud prevention.
• Appointed The Trade Desk’s first Chief Data and Trust Officer in October 2019, a newly created role.
• Holds board, advisory and investor positions across growth companies including Zefr and Madhive.
• Previously served on the board of iQ Media.
• Roughly two decades of executive leadership across technology and media.
• Holds an MBA from MIT Sloan and a master’s in Mathematics from Northwestern University.

Professional Journey

Swadia holds a master’s degree in Mathematics from Northwestern University and an MBA from MIT’s Sloan School of Management, and built a career across technology and media concentrated on data quality, privacy and trust in digital advertising.

The defining role was leading White Ops as Chief Executive Officer. White Ops, later renamed HUMAN, worked on the detection of non-human traffic — the automated bots that view and click advertisements, consuming budgets that advertisers believe are reaching people. The problem was structurally awkward for the industry: everyone in the supply chain was paid on volume, so the incentive to look closely at whether that volume was real was weak. White Ops built the detection capability and, with it, the evidence that forced the issue, and Swadia helped orchestrate what became an industry-wide overhaul of fraud prevention practice.

In October 2019 The Trade Desk appointed him its first Chief Data and Trust Officer, creating the position. The remit combined two things usually kept apart: making advertising more relevant through better data, and improving consumer and business trust in how that data is used. The timing was deliberate — the industry was entering the period in which privacy regulation, browser restrictions on third-party cookies, and public scrutiny of behavioural advertising converged, and a demand-side platform’s long-term position depended on being able to answer for its data practices rather than simply optimizing against them.

He has since moved into board, advisory and investor work with growth companies, including Zefr, which works on content-level brand suitability, and Madhive, in connected television advertising. Both operate in the same territory his executive career covered: establishing that advertising is reaching real people, in contexts advertisers would accept, in ways that stand up to scrutiny.

Education

MIT Sloan School of Management

MBA

Northwestern University

Master’s degree, Mathematics