Emberos, the operating system for AI Brand Management, today announced three senior commercial appointments: Aakash Arya as Vice President of Sales, Enterprise; Adam Alter as Head of Agency; and Brian Maihack as Head of Growth. Arya will lead direct sales to brands, Alter will lead relationships with agencies and their clients, and Maihack will build the company’s business with game publishers and platforms.
The hires follow emberos’ oversubscribed $5.5 million seed round in September, which brought total funding to $6.7 million. In its first year, the company moved from pre-seed to production inside global holding companies, entertainment studios and consumer brands. Most recently, emberos was selected from more than 600 RFI submissions as one of 11 companies in HorizonOS Labs’ third cohort, Horizon Media’s structured innovation accelerator.
“AI Brand Management touches every corner of business, from CMOs and agency leaders to platform teams in gaming,” said Justin Inman, Founder and CEO of emberos. “Aakash, Adam, and Brian have each spent over a decade earning trust in these spaces. When you’re defining a category that didn’t exist two years ago, that track record and experience is incredibly important.”
Aakash Arya
Arya will lead enterprise sales from Los Angeles. He joins from Kargo, where he rose to Vice President of West Sales, helped scale the West business and led teams named ThinkLA Partner of the Year in back-to-back years.
“One of the biggest questions for brand leaders today is: what is AI saying about us, and how do we respond?" said Arya. "Emberos gives brands the intelligence and tools to answer that question and take action. I'm excited to help make AI Brand Management an essential enterprise capability.”
Adam Alter
Based in New York, Alter leads go-to-market for agencies. He most recently served as Managing Director, North America at WPP’s Acceleration, after six years at Google.
“When something changes in how people find brands, clients call their agency first, and right now that call is often about AI,” said Alter. “We partner with agencies so they have real data on how models represent their clients, and solutions to help their clients manage their presence in LLMs. When agencies can be trusted advisors to brands on technology evolutions, all parties win. I want every major agency to be able to tap into our support.”
Brian Maihack
Maihack will lead growth, starting with gaming. At PlayStation, he was the founding executive of the company’s global advertising business, which became a significant revenue stream under his leadership before his role expanded to lead new commercial ventures. Since 2024, he has advised Life360 and several AI companies.
"I've spent most of my career helping game companies create value along the player journey. AI is collapsing that journey into a single surface, and the channels we used to treat as tried-and-true don't map to it like they once did. Marketing and commercial teams are starting to see that," said Maihack. "I joined emberos for the opportunity to help lead the industry through that shift, from the moment a player discovers a game to long after they're playing it."
Founded in 2025 and based in Los Angeles, emberos is the operating system for AI Brand Management. The platform enables brands to understand how AI systems perceive them, predict where their narrative is heading, shape that narrative at the source and prove what changed. Powered by the emberos Brand Knowledge Graph and five specialized AI agents (Scout, Pilot, Flow, Merchant and Echo), emberos gives organizations the intelligence, execution, measurement and governance infrastructure required to manage their brands across AI systems including ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Perplexity, Grok and DeepSeek. Emberos is backed by a private consortium of strategic angel investors. Learn more at emberos.ai.
