Publisher First, Inc. (Freestar)

What is Publisher First, Inc.?

Publisher First, Inc. is the legal name of the company that operates as Freestar, a Scottsdale-based ad tech firm providing managed monetization and header bidding technology to publishers.

Who owns Freestar?

Freestar is owned by founders David Freedman and Chris Stark together with private equity investors who invested in January 2021. It remains a private company.

Is Freestar a public company?

No. Publisher First, Inc. is privately held and has no stock exchange listing.

When was Freestar founded?

Freestar was founded in 2015, after the founders' earlier ventures including the Tempe12 calendar business and the DigitalMGMT ad operations consultancy.

Where is Freestar headquartered?

Freestar's headquarters is in Scottsdale, Arizona. Its team of roughly 200 people is distributed across 15 countries.

What is Freestar's market position?

Freestar is a mid-to-large player in managed publisher monetization, known for its 2019 Inc. 5000 number one ranking and a customer NPS above 75. Third-party estimates put annual revenue near $98 million.

The company's path to ad tech ran through a college swimsuit calendar. David Freedman built Tempe12 at Arizona State University, expanding it to 21 colleges, and in 2008 Chris Stark joined to scale its online ad sales. The pair launched DigitalMGMT, a consultancy helping other publishers with ad operations, which gave them the playbook they would later productize.

A 2014 attempt to roll up nine small websites as a mini publishing group failed commercially but taught them the ad operations problem deeply enough to pivot. Freestar launched in 2015 as a managed service that took ad operations off publishers' plates entirely, built around header bidding and yield optimization.

Growth from 2016 to 2019 was explosive enough to top the Inc. 5000 in 2019 as America's fastest-growing private company. A private equity investment in January 2021 funded expansion, and the company built an engineering organization exceeding 60 people. Over the following years it moved upmarket, adding an enterprise technology tier alongside the flagship managed service and taking a leadership-tier Prebid.org membership with a board seat.

By its tenth anniversary in 2025 the company described itself as a "publisher operating system" spanning managed service, enterprise technology, and the Freestar Intelligence Suite for data and AI yield optimization. Its 2025-2026 product focus included ad-block recovery evaluation, identity provider testing, and AI-assisted analytics for clients.

The company's ethics exposure is standard for ad tech: inventory quality, privacy compliance, and user experience across publisher sites. Its leadership-tier membership and board seat at Prebid.org represent an industry-governance commitment to the open source header bidding standard on which much of its stack depends.

Freestar's signature recognition is the number one position on the 2019 Inc. 5000 as the fastest-growing private company in the United States. It has also appeared on Arizona growth and workplace lists and holds a governance-level seat at Prebid.org.

No major regulatory action or defining scandal attaches to Freestar. Like all managed ad providers it sits within ongoing industry scrutiny of ad density, inventory quality, and privacy compliance, addressed through standard frameworks and its Prebid.org governance participation.