MiQ Sigma: AI-Powered Solution to Programmatic Ad Challenges

In an industry overwhelmed by data, tools, and channels, programmatic advertising has evolved into a leading force in advertising, and ad-tech is scaling in tandem with the plethora of challenges it faces. However, with audiences fragmented across streaming platforms, websites, mobile apps, and connected devices, the sheer volume of signals is unprecedented. Yet the tools meant to simplify decision-making have often added layers of complexity, especially due to omnichannel media fragmentation.

Given this backdrop, the industry is mired in disconnected platforms, siloed data, and sluggish workflows. What should be agile, insight-driven marketing has turned into a daily struggle. For instance, campaigns are launched with incomplete insights, optimisations rely on intuition more than intelligence, and marketers are left navigating a maze of technology that rarely speaks the same language.

The Fragmentation Challenge in Programmatic

The biggest challenge in digital advertising today isn’t reach or performance, it’s fragmentation. Underlying pain points such as platform sprawl, incompatible data sets, and siloed decision-making have created inefficiencies and complexities across the board. While consumers effortlessly move between devices and platforms, marketers are forced to juggle disconnected tools just to keep up.

This complexity affects everything , from discovering the right audiences to planning effective media buys, and ultimately activating campaigns across channels. There’s no single view, no connected workflow, and certainly no real-time feedback loop smart enough to keep pace with modern media.

MiQ’s answer to this problem is Sigma, an AI-powered advertising platform engineered to connect the entire programmatic ecosystem under one unified intelligence layer. MiQ is an AdTech company that specializes in programmatic media and intelligence. Founded in 2010 by Lee Puri and Gurman Hundal, it is headquartered in New York, with a strong presence in Bengaluru through its “Center of Excellence” for data science and analytics.

It positions itself as a DSP-agnostic, omnichannel programmatic partner, blending AI with expert trading teams to help brands and agencies plan, execute, and optimize campaigns across channels such as display, video, Connected TV, among others.

Recently, at its Bengaluru CoE, the senior leadership gave a peek into its operations and how it aims to transform the programmatic adtech space.

“Today is not just a launch of Sigma, it’s the culmination of everything we’ve built over the last 15 years," said Gurman Hundal, Global CEO and co-founder of MiQ. “Sigma makes everything we do faster, smarter, and more connected. It gives our teams and clients a serious edge in a rapidly changing market.”

Decoding Sigma: AI That Understands, Acts, and Learns

According to the company’s senior leadership, MiQ Sigma is not just another platform. It is the culmination of over a decade of its campaign data, trading knowledge, and deep expertise in programmatic. Built entirely in India at MiQ’s Bengaluru Centre of Excellence (CoE), Sigma is designed to unify more than 300 disparate data feeds and process over 700 trillion behavioural signals about what people are watching, browsing, and buying.  

 According to the company, the early results have been very promising:

• A 132% improvement in conversion rate
• A 57% reduction in cost-per-action (CPA)

The company also underscores that Sigma is not a Demand-Side Platform (DSP) or a buying tool. It doesn’t compete with media platforms, rather, it connects them. It sits above the existing stack, acting as the command centre that interprets intent, finds audiences, plans media, and activates campaigns across platforms. It is faster and more intelligent than ever before.

"Sigma isn’t just a product; it’s a bold statement of what India can build when deep tech meets deep talent. MiQ Sigma is a new paradigm that truly puts results first and allows a well-written prompt to slice through the complexity of our ecosystem, offering unparalleled opportunities for engineers and AI researchers to solve complex, real-world problems," says Ramya Parashar, COO of MiQ CoE.

Built, Not Bought: Powered by India’s Deep Tech

There is no off-the-shelf solution for what Sigma does. Its architecture is custom-built by a strong 300+ innovation team based in MiQ’s Bengaluru CoE.

The CoE is structured on these lines:

• 50% Engineering: Focused on observability, scalability, and the core infrastructure powering global media execution
• 40% Data Science & Analytics: Dedicated to building insights, developing reusable models, and translating data into campaign intelligence
• 10% Creative & Support Functions: Handling ad operations and creative services for end-to-end delivery

‘Sigma is a direct outcome of this CoE’s capabilities, from architecture to algorithms, “ asserts Ramya.

As Krishnakumar Govindarajan, MiQ’s Global CTO, puts it, “In the past, marketers had to make arbitrary choices around what ad platforms to use. MiQ Sigma is a single-point-of-entry where you can harness intelligence, discover audiences, and then use agentic AI to execute multi-platform media buys in a matter of seconds.”

“MiQ Sigma was built as an extensible, modular system - capable of ingesting massive datasets, applying LLM-based reasoning, and automating decision-making across DSPs. Our team in Bengaluru turned this complex vision into reality,” explains Krishnakumar.

Three Layers of Unification: The CxO’s Vision

At its core, Sigma is built to unify three distinct (but historically siloed) layers of the programmatic workflow:

Unified Customer View: Connecting what people watch, browse, and buy to provide a real-time, intelligent understanding of consumer behaviour

Unified Programmatic Execution: Managing campaigns across 15+ DSPs, allowing seamless execution without trade-offs

Unified Workflows: Empowering marketers and traders with intuitive tools that work across platforms with speed and simplicity

This unification is not conceptual, it is operational and available now, says the company.

Intelligence That’s Actually Intelligent

The company emphasises that Sigma’s AI capabilities are built for business outcomes. Among its most powerful features are:

Sigma Intelligence: An advanced data visualisation engine connects insights from 1.7 billion global audience profiles across hundreds of data sources, from viewing habits to purchasing patterns. This provides marketers with a rich, cross-channel view they can act on.

Interactive Trading Agent: Trained on 15 years of MiQ trading data and supported by leading LLMs - Claude, Gemini, and OpenAI - this agent allows traders to use natural language commands to manage and optimise campaigns. What once took hours of manual effort can now be done in seconds.

GenAI Personas: MiQ’s generative AI capabilities are applied to one of the most complex challenges in marketing: understanding the customer. Sigma can generate custom audience profiles in real time, turning brand briefs into fully-formed audience strategies ready to activate.

A Platform Backed by Ecosystem Trust

MiQ Sigma is globally integrated with top-tier technology and data partners such as - The Trade Desk, Google DV360, Amazon Web Services, Samba, Experian, Databricks, Celtra, Numerator, Circana, and others. These aren’t superficial connections,  they’re core integrations that ensure Sigma works as a flexible, extensible platform.

Matt Fogarty, GM Channel Partners at The Trade Desk, reflecting on the partnership with MiQ said, “MiQ’s commitment to building AI-driven, agnostic technology aligns with the future of programmatic. Sigma sets the new standard moving forward.”

India: Not Just a Back-End, but a Frontline

MiQ’s India CoE has powered global innovations across verticals including B2B, healthcare, and gaming. Sigma is its most visible achievement yet. The CoE also helps MiQ convert global vision into execution by collecting intelligence across markets, learning from thousands of brand and agency partners, and scaling insights at the speed of programmatic evolution.

MiQ is expanding its commercial footprint too. With a base in Mumbai and a growing client list of 200+ Indian companies, the company is doubling down on India as a market — not just a talent hub.

“While programmatic in India is still maturing, we see significant potential, and we’re committed to shaping and accelerating that evolution,” explains Ramya.

The Bigger Picture: More Than Just Software

The company says it is bringing the best of AI, data science, and human problem-solving together. It’s the result of years of building, learning, and optimising, and in many ways reflects a mindset that says: We’re not waiting for the industry to fix itself. We’re fixing it.

In a world where every click matters and every impression counts, MiQ Sigma is bullish about its play in the programmatic advertising space. As Ramya sums up, “Our team brought together AI, data science, and real-world programmatic knowledge to shape the future of advertising.”