Overview

Automate Ads (originally Kuhcoon) was a Y Combinator-backed ad-tech startup founded in 2011 in Scranton, Pennsylvania, that built software to fully automate Facebook ad campaign management for small and medium-sized businesses.The company's core thesis was that SMBs spending between $20,000 and $1 million per month on Facebook ads were underserved by enterprise tools like Nanigans and Kenshoo, and that full automation — not just recommendations — could save them both money and time.

By February 2015, the company claimed 6,000 advertisers across 90 countries.By October 2017, it had been acquired for an undisclosed sum by AdHawk, with its CEO long gone, its team disbanded, and its business described as having "basically shut down." The company's collapse was triggered by founder abandonment — CEO Andrew Torba left in August 2016 to found Gab — but structural vulnerabilities including thin capitalization, single-platform dependency, and a product moat that Facebook's own improving algorithms were steadily eroding made the company too fragile to survive without its driving founder.

Founding Story

Andrew Torba and Charles Szymanski were childhood best friends from Scranton, Pennsylvania. Torba had recently graduated from the University of Scranton; Szymanski was attending Drexel University when they co-founded the company in 2011.^[1] The two are also described as college roommates at the time of founding, though the exact living arrangement across two different universities is unclear.^[2]

The founding insight was practical. Torba later told Wishpond in a February 2015 podcast interview that he started Kuhcoon after finding it nearly impossible to manage a client's Facebook ad campaigns on mobile — the existing tools were desktop-bound, manual, and time-consuming.^[3] The solution he envisioned was not a better dashboard but a system that would make decisions on behalf of the advertiser: pause underperforming ads, rotate creative variants, and allocate budget — all without human intervention.

The company operated for roughly three years before gaining significant outside validation. There is no public record of revenue, customers, or product milestones from 2011 to late 2014 — suggesting a long bootstrapped or pre-revenue period. In late 2014, Torba and Szymanski won a competition that resulted in Y Combinator accepting Kuhcoon into its Winter 2015 batch.^[4] The acceptance prompted a move from Scranton to Palo Alto, which Torba marked with a Medium post on New Year's Eve 2014: "Scranton will always be our home, but Silicon Valley has always been our destiny."^[5]

That framing — Silicon Valley as destiny — would prove bitterly ironic. Within two years, Torba would describe his experience there as a disillusionment: "I became incredibly disillusioned after only one year living and working with some of the 'top names' and companies. These are not good people."^[6]

At YC, the team was described by Washington Post sources as "mild-mannered and largely unremarkable" — not top of the batch, but respected for their work ethic.^[7] Torba served as CEO and the public face of the company; Szymanski served as CTO and handled the technical architecture.^[8] The two-person founding team structure — with no other executives on record — would later prove to be a critical single point of failure.

Timeline

• 2011 — Andrew Torba and Charles Szymanski co-found Kuhcoon in Scranton, Pennsylvania. Torba is CEO; Szymanski is CTO.^[2]

• December 2014 — Y Combinator accepts Kuhcoon into its Winter 2015 batch. Torba publishes a Medium post announcing the move to Northern California: "Silicon Valley has always been our destiny."^[9]

• February 2015 — TechCrunch covers Kuhcoon during the YC W15 Demo Day period. The company claims 6,000 advertisers in 90+ countries. Torba states the grand plan is to "automate all of paid media spending on the Internet."^[10]