SQREEM Taps Google Veteran to Lead U.S. Expansion With Behavioral AI

NEW YORK, NY – September 23, 2026 — The digital advertising ecosystem is undergoing a tectonic structural shift, and the migration of senior executive talent is often the most reliable leading indicator of where the market is heading next. SQREEM Technologies, a Singapore-founded behavioral intelligence company, has announced a sweeping acceleration of its U.S. expansion, anchored by the appointment of three heavyweight executives.

Stephen Yap, a 17-year Google veteran who co-architected Google Analytics 360, has been named Chief Executive Officer. Adam Herman, who previously served as the company's President of Media for North America, transitions to Chief Commercial Officer. Rounding out the new C-suite is Kelly Leger, a former Amazon Ads and Merkle executive who joins as Chief Growth Officer.

The appointments signal a decisive pivot for the 15-year-old intelligence firm. By aggressively targeting the U.S. market, SQREEM is making a calculated bid to replace legacy, cookie-dependent measurement platforms with its proprietary "Large Behavioral Model" (LBM)—a real-time AI architecture designed to predict human intent without relying on retrospective tracking.

“We’ve built SQREEM to disrupt an industry long reliant on outdated retrospective measurement,” said René Raiss, Founder of SQREEM Technologies. “After fifteen years of technological innovation, bringing on executives of this caliber positions SQREEM to challenge legacy paradigms and accelerate our growth across the U.S. market.”

The Big Tech Exodus to Foundational AI

The recruitment of Yap and Leger highlights a growing trend among adtech veterans: abandoning legacy platforms and publicly traded giants in favor of agile, AI-native startups.

Yap brings over two decades of tech leadership to the table. During his extensive tenure at Google and DoubleClick, he led the Google Marketing Platform for the Americas and was instrumental in building the foundational data and measurement products that defined the Web 2.0 advertising era. Most recently, Yap served as Global Chief Revenue Officer at Perion Network. His departure from Perion after roughly a year and a half underscores the headwinds facing traditional adtech companies that are heavily tethered to search syndication and legacy programmatic models.

Similarly, Leger's move to SQREEM brings formidable intellectual property credentials. A recognized 25-year industry leader, she is officially listed as a co-inventor on the foundational patents underpinning Dentsu’s M1 platform—a people-based audience planning ecosystem that has been a cornerstone of Madison Avenue data strategy.

“Organizations have access to more data than ever before, but data alone doesn’t create understanding,” said Stephen Yap, CEO of SQREEM. “Our opportunity is to understand human behavior at a scale and speed that hasn’t been possible before, and translate that intelligence into better decisions and experiences. As we expand into the U.S., we’re building toward an ambition much larger than commercial growth, one that fundamentally improves how organizations understand and engage people while ultimately advancing the human condition.”

From Singapore to Madison Avenue

To understand SQREEM's U.S. ambitions, one must look at the aggressive, highly calculated rollup strategy the company has executed over the past five years in the Asia-Pacific region. Backed initially by Enterprise Singapore's Scale-up SG program, SQREEM did not emerge overnight as a Silicon Valley darling. It spent over a decade refining its quantitative algorithms in complex sectors like wealth management, defense, and epidemiological tracking before fully pivoting to digital media.

Between 2021 and 2026, the company transformed from a technology licensing shop into a formidable programmatic holding group. It acquired Singapore-based Gamma SSP to control auction mechanics, absorbed Australian DSP Trade Indy in a $30 million share-swap deal, and acquired TotallyAwesome, an APAC youth marketing network boasting a reach of 900 million users and deep COPPA and GDPR-K compliance architectures.

Now, with a robust global infrastructure in place, the company is turning its sights on the lucrative U.S. mid-market agencies and enterprise brands. This is where Adam Herman’s transition to Chief Commercial Officer becomes critical. Herman, who has a track record of scaling venture-backed adtech businesses into nine-figure revenues, is tasked with commercializing SQREEM's technology across retail media networks and programmatic buyers who are desperate for off-site behavioral intent data.

Beyond the Cookie: The Rise of the Large Behavioral Model

The core technological differentiator driving this executive migration is SQREEM’s Large Behavioral Model. Unlike Large Language Models (LLMs), which predict the next token in a text sequence based on static, retrospective corpora, SQREEM’s LBM is a dynamic probabilistic engine designed to analyze non-verbal digital behavior in real time.

The scale of ingestion is staggering. The LBM monitors behavioral event streams across more than 5 billion web domains, 26 social networks, and the bidstreams of the 10 largest global ad exchanges. Traditional adtech relies heavily on 30-day pixel lookbacks and deprecated third-party cookie identifiers. SQREEM’s engine processes live signals to infer active intent, resolving these cohorts against 36 global identity frameworks instantaneously.

Perhaps the most disruptive element of SQREEM’s U.S. strategy is its integration with MCP-led agentic workflows. The Model Context Protocol (MCP), a standardized bridge between AI models and external tools, has rapidly become the backbone of enterprise AI. Rather than forcing media buyers to log into yet another isolated dashboard, SQREEM exposes an MCP endpoint. This allows autonomous media-buying agents and in-house enterprise AI copilots to prompt SQREEM’s behavioral model directly, retrieving real-time cohorts and instructing execution engines to bid programmatically without human intervention.

Cracking the Retail Media Network Code

As the U.S. advertising market grapples with the compounding shocks of signal degradation and privacy regulations, Retail Media Networks (RMNs) have emerged as the fastest-growing sector in digital ad spend. However, these networks face a critical vulnerability: they struggle to expand their audiences off-site because they cannot export proprietary purchase data outside their walled gardens.

This is the exact vulnerability SQREEM intends to exploit. While B2B intent providers like Bombora remain dominant in domain-level tracking, and legacy identity resolution firms like LiveRamp rely on static batch data processing, SQREEM is positioning its LBM as a real-time behavioral layer that sits on top of existing identity graphs.

By offering broad, multi-channel web and social ingestion that is natively privacy-compliant—operating at the cohort and anonymized pattern level—the company offers a compelling alternative for brands trying to navigate a fragmented, post-cookie landscape. With Yap, Herman, and Leger at the helm, the Singaporean tech firm is no longer just an overseas challenger; it is a heavily armed combatant stepping directly onto Madison Avenue's home turf, armed with the kind of foundational AI that legacy platforms will find difficult to replicate.