Rembrand and Whisper World, two in-content advertising companies that place brands into video after it’s filmed, are merging in a largely stock-based deal expected to close in January.
The combined company, WRLabs, will be led by Whisper World founder Manav Kapoor as group CEO and co-chair. Omar Tawakol, CEO of Rembrand, will become co-chair.
An IPO is “absolutely” on the table, Tawakol said, adding that WRLabs will raise money after the deal closes.
For Rembrand, the merger brings scale. Whisper World’s in-content ad business is much larger than Rembrand’s, and Tawakol said it will grow the company about fourfold and make its in-content ad business “instantly profitable.”
The deal also brings a decade of proprietary footage to train Rembrand’s models. Whisper World built a business by putting virtual billboards into TV shows across Asia, Africa and the Middle East, using more than 100 visual effects artists editing each scene by hand.
“Now you have an AI company that has proprietary data that isn’t just burning cash,” Tawakol said.
For Whisper World, the deal brings the technology that can handle far more insertions without new hires. It also serves as an entry point into the U.S. through Rembrand’s supply partnerships with companies such as Paramount and Hallmark, Kapoor said. Building that alone would take longer and cost more, he added.
WRLabs will act as the parent company and fund research into AI video editing. Rembrand becomes the technology arm, building VFXAgent, which the company described as a “coding agent for visual effects.”
Whisper World, Spaceback and MRFactory keep their names.
Whisper World will continue selling in-content ads; Spaceback, which Rembrand merged with last year, turns social posts into paid ads; and MRFactory, a Madrid studio known for its work on Money Heist, runs virtual production studios.
Selling the scene
Virtual product placement has historically been hard to buy at scale, Tawakol said. Brand and show owners negotiated every product placement, down to the scene and whether the product would be placed next to an actor with a competing endorsement deal.
Founded in 2013, Whisper World’s strategy was to take the negotiation out. It now puts virtual billboards into established shots after the actors have left the frame, so directors don’t have to sign off, and show owners approve the inventory without knowing which brand will fill it. Placements run as 15-second units with minimums for time on screen and share of screen, and are measured in gross rating points through Kantar, the same way advertisers measure TV spots.
“They solved a problem nobody had solved, including us,” Tawakol said.
Unilever, Nestlé and Procter & Gamble have bought the format for five years, Kapoor noted. Whisper World now completes about 30,000 insertions a year, and Rembrand’s AI handles about 70% of them in South Africa and India.
The arrangement also gives Rembrand training data it couldn’t get from YouTube: premium TV and film footage, plus the artists’ original edits. Tawakol said the model improved every week as Whisper World’s artists used it and flagged where it fell short.
Room to grow
Tawakol founded Rembrand in 2022, after selling BlueKai to Oracle in 2014 and Voicea to Cisco in 2019. It raised $23 million in Series A in January 2025, bringing its total funding to $31 million.
Tawakol declined to give Rembrand’s current valuation, but said the roughly $80 million figure that has been reported dates to its Series A in early 2025, when the company had about $2 million in bookings, and it’s now about 20 times that size.
The two companies first met in June 2025 as partners. That November, they started discussing a merger, signed a term sheet in February, and reached a definitive agreement this month.
WRLabs will have about 450 employees in eight countries and work with roughly 3,000 advertisers, and its businesses reach over 2 billion viewers a month, according to the company. Tawakol said the teams will largely keep their current roles and no layoffs are planned.
IPO plans are still early, but Tawakol is bullish. “If the market doesn’t adjust, we get a good valuation,” he said. “If it does adjust, [investors will] be favoring ones that could drive profit. We win either way.”
