James Hassett is Co-Founder and CTO at Kovva, an AI agentic platform built to eliminate operational drag for media buying teams at agencies and brands.

James studied Mechatronic Engineering and Computer Science at the University of Melbourne, and previously worked as an automation engineer at Tesla before moving into ad tech.

James believes media buyers should be freed from tedious cross-platform grunt work so they can focus on strategy, famously noting that Kovva concentrates on workflows that cause the most operational pain.

Prior to Kovva, James co-founded Martin, a DSP acquired by PubMatic in 2022, after which he served as PubMatic's VP of Engineering, bringing deep expertise in programmatic infrastructure and machine learning.

Kovva launched out of closed beta in 2025 with around 50 integrations spanning DSPs, ad servers, social platforms and measurement products, positioning itself as the connective AI layer across the fragmented media buying stack.