Smartly names ex-Netflix executive Kelly Uphoff CTO. Thu, 8th Oct 2026 (Today) Smartly has appointed Kelly Uphoff as Chief Technology Officer, bringing in a former senior technology executive from Tala and Netflix. Uphoff will lead the company's global engineering organisation and oversee work on its AI-focused advertising platform. Her remit includes systems designed to learn from campaign signals across creative, media, measurement and optimisation. The appointment marks a senior leadership change at the advertising technology group as it puts greater emphasis on automated decision-making in marketing. The role will focus on developing technology that uses campaign data to inform subsequent creative and media choices. Uphoff joins from Tala, where she served as Chief Technology Officer and led technology for the financial platform. Before that, she spent a decade at Netflix, leading data science and engineering teams working across machine learning, predictive modelling and experimentation. Her background in personalisation and AI informed the hire as advertisers shift from using AI to generate assets to applying it across a broader set of campaign decisions, including how campaigns are created, activated, measured and adjusted. Leadership change Uphoff succeeds Lauri Tarkkala as Chief Technology Officer. During his tenure, Tarkkala oversaw a reworking of Smartly's technology foundation and the development of its unified platform. That period also included the integration of acquisitions such as Ad-Lib.io, Viralspace.ai and INCRMNTAL, which expanded the company's work in creative and campaign decisioning. Laura Desmond, Chief Executive Officer at Smartly, linked the appointment to wider changes in the development of advertising technology. "Advertising is entering a fundamentally new era, where AI and intelligent systems will reshape how brands understand and respond to consumers, make decisions and turn intelligence into action," said Laura Desmond, Chief Executive Officer at Smartly. Desmond also outlined the company's view of the role AI will play in its products and engineering priorities. "Kelly understands that in an AI-native system, every signal is an opportunity to learn and make the next decision better. She brings the technical depth, AI expertise and customer orientation to help us accelerate the continuous optimization loops across creative and media, where every action generates intelligence that improves what comes next. That is how we create better experiences for people and better outcomes for marketers," Desmond said. Smartly's latest executive hire comes as advertising groups across the sector try to apply AI to more than content production. Many are seeking tools that can combine data analysis, experimentation and automation to decide which audiences to target, which creative treatments to use and how budgets should shift during a campaign. In that context, technical leadership has become more central to product strategy. Companies in the adtech market are under pressure to show that AI can improve measurable campaign performance while fitting into the systems brands and agencies already use. For Smartly, that means continuing to build around a platform model that unifies campaign functions rather than treating media buying, creative development and measurement as separate tasks. Its engineering work is increasingly focused on continuous decision intelligence across the campaign lifecycle. Uphoff said that trend shaped her decision to join the business. "The next chapter of advertising will require technology that can continuously learn, make better decisions and translate intelligence into experiences that are genuinely relevant to each consumer," said Kelly Uphoff, incoming Chief Technology Officer at Smartly. She also pointed to Smartly's existing technical base and the scope for further development. "Smartly has built a strong technology foundation and has a compelling opportunity to bring AI, data and decision-making together in ways that create meaningful value for marketers. I'm excited to join the team and help build what comes next to move advertising forward," Uphoff said.

Crossmint and Tala have partnered to integrate stablecoin wallet infrastructure with AI-native credit services. Companies using Crossmint can now offer Tala-underwritten credit to their users, whilst Tala has embedded Crossmint smart wallets in its app, initially launching to over 1 million customers in Mexico. The partnership addresses financial access challenges in low- and middle-income economies, where 44% of adults cannot reliably access emergency funds, according to the World Bank's Global Findex 2025. Tala's Mexican customers will receive a new wallet experience built on Crossmint infrastructure, holding balances in a digital asset pegged to the Mexican peso on Solana. Users earn rewards for timely loan repayments, which arrive in seconds. Backed by over $500 million in funding, Tala has distributed more than $9 billion to 14 million customers across Africa, Latin America, and Asia.

Meet Eric weber, Tala's new Chief Technology Officer. Eric joins Tala as Chief Technology Officer after leading engineers, data scientists, and AI infrastructure specialists at Grammarly. Before that, [...] Eric joins Tala as Chief Technology Officer after leading engineers, data scientists, and AI infrastructure specialists at Grammarly. Before that, he held senior data and engineering leadership roles at Stitch Fix, Yelp, and LinkedIn. He holds a Ph.D. and an MBA from the University of Chicago Booth. As CTO, Eric will lead Tala's engineering, data, and AI functions, with a focus on the platform infrastructure that supports Tala's work across lending, payments and financial services. Tell Tala about your background. I started my career in data science and spent years building toward larger technical organizations with deep product focus. At Yelp and LinkedIn, I built data infrastructure and measurement at scale. At Stitch Fix, the work shifted to embedding machine learning and experimentation as the core operating system. The models drove decisions end-to-end, and that required very different thinking about how you build, validate, and maintain technical systems. At Grammarly, I led a global team spanning engineering, data science, data platform, and AI infrastructure. Managing that scope taught me a lot about keeping quality high as teams and systems grow and ensuring that growth is tightly connected to product and business velocity. I also hold a Ph.D., and that educational background and love for teaching shapes how I approach platform problems. Understanding why something works, not just that it works, tends to produce better systems over time. Being able to teach others about that system shows that you understand it at a level where your opinion counts. What drew you to Tala? I actually learnt about Tala about a decade ago while living in Southern California, and I thought that the mission was incredible - it resonated with me. Now being a leader at Tala ten years later and seeing the foundational architecture behind the scenes makes me excited to scale it to the next phase to serve more of the global majority. Tala has built something that takes years to accumulate: proprietary data from customers in markets that traditional financial institutions largely don't serve, models trained on that data, and infrastructure to act on it. This technical advantage can't be easily replicated and gives Tala a head start on others who might move into the space. I've spent my career building data and AI systems, and the question of who benefits from those systems is one I think about. Tala's mission deeply resonated with me because it focuses on customers that are far outside of the tech world. Tala is using its platform to expand credit access for people who have largely been shut out from accessing it. I'm also joining Tala at a critical time in its industry. Modern payment infrastructure is changing what's possible for companies operating across borders, and Tala is well positioned to move with that shift. I wanted to be part of building the technical foundation that makes it happen. How do you think about building and scaling technology platforms? First, systems need to solve a real problem. I challenge teams to only build platforms once there are three or more clear use cases where unified infrastructure is a competitive advantage. I don't believe in the "if you build it, they will come" approach. Second, before scaling products on top of infrastructure, the underlying systems need to be reliable, observable, and maintainable. Companies that skip the "prove it" moment and don't think about what a platform needs to be great at slow down later, often at the worst moments, or build something that has no real demand. The second piece is the relationship between data and decisions. A strong platform doesn't just store and retrieve information. It improves over time, surfaces the right signal at the right moment, and makes the people building on top of it more capable and more efficient. Treating data and AI infrastructure as a core asset rather than overhead is something I've seen make a real difference in how companies grow. This is particularly important in the AI moment Tala is in where everyone is searching for what sets them apart. The third is team structure. Technical systems reflect the organizations that build them, starting with clear ownership that sets high craft standards. Establishing a culture where engineers feel accountable for outcomes matters just as much as any architectural decision. I think about engineering organizations as go-to-market-minded builders. Everyone building has a responsibility to understand how the business generates revenue, to know what its customers want, and to not wait for others to give them priorities. What trends or technologies are you most focused on for Tala's platform? AI systems in production are the first. Many organizations have run AI experiments, but fewer have built the infrastructure needed to run those models reliably at scale, keep them updated, and audit their behavior. For Tala, getting that right matters across credit decisioning, predictive models, and customer intelligence. The success of the business and enablement of the global majority depends on it. The second is the shift in financial infrastructure. Stablecoins and programmable payment rails are changing what's possible for cross-border financial services. The possibilities for serving customers didn't look like this five years ago, and Tala's platform has embraced this shift to onchain finance and will need to continue operating at the pace of innovation. The third is proprietary data. As models improve, organizations with richer, more reliable data assets will increasingly outperform those without them. Tala has built that asset over years of operating in markets where others haven't. Making sure Tala get full value from it and keep building on it is a core part of what I'm here to do.