Smalk AI, the Paris-based company building the advertising layer for AI search, announced on 28 May 2026 that Olivier Debray and Victor Charpin have joined as co-founders. The two appointments complete a founding team that already included Co-founder and Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Kristofer Moisan and Co-founder and Chief Technology Officer (CTO) Antonin Lacombe.

Olivier Debray joins as Co-founder and Senior Vice President (SVP) Global Brands & Agencies, leading the demand side of the business. Victor Charpin joins as Co-founder and Global SVP Publishers & Partnerships, leading the supply side. The split gives Smalk AI dedicated leadership for each side of the market it is building through Generative Engine Advertising (GEA).

Two careers that span the history of search advertising

Olivier Debray and Victor Charpin have between them nearly five decades in digital advertising, and their careers track the entire history of paid search. Both were at Yahoo in the 2000s, working on sponsored search — the Overture-era auction model that first turned a search query into ad inventory — and the two have known and worked alongside each other in the French market ever since.

Their paths then specialized along the two sides of the ad market. Victor Charpin spent twenty-five years on the supply side: he helped launch one of France's first pay-per-click networks in 1999, introduced real-time bidding to French publishers, built the country's first native advertising network at Ligatus, and most recently ran programmatic supply and publisher monetization at Outbrain and Paved. Olivier Debray spent his career on the demand side: more than a decade at Yahoo across sponsored search and agency sales, followed by a role as one of the first employees at Snap Inc. in France, where he helped build the local team and scale mobile monetization.

Both sides of a new ad network: brands on one side, publishers on the other

An advertising platform for AI search faces the same structural requirement as every ad network before it: it has to serve both demand and supply. Brands and agencies need a way to appear inside AI-generated answers; publishers need a way to be paid when their content is used to produce those answers. Smalk AI has now placed a co-founder in charge of each side — Olivier Debray on demand, Victor Charpin on supply — with Kristofer Moisan and Antonin Lacombe building the product and platform that connect them.

The structure mirrors the model the two helped operate earlier in their careers, when search advertising paired advertiser demand with publisher inventory. What has changed is the medium. As consumers shift from typing queries and clicking links to asking AI assistants such as ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity, both sides of the old search economy are being rebuilt at once, and Smalk AI is positioning GEA as the category that reconnects them.

  • Olivier Debray, Co-founder & SVP Global Brands & Agencies — adoption of GEA among advertisers, brands, and media agencies.
  • Victor Charpin, Co-founder & Global SVP Publishers & Partnerships — publisher monetization and the citation-based revenue model for content owners.
  • Kristofer Moisan, Co-founder & CEO, and Antonin Lacombe, Co-founder & CTO — the GEA platform and ad infrastructure connecting the two sides.

Both new co-founders framed their mandates in terms of the side of the market they now own.

I spent twenty years helping brands win the search auction. That arena has moved: consumers now ask ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity, and the brands that are not named in the answer are simply not considered. Generative Engine Advertising gives advertisers a way back into that moment, and it is what the AI search market needs to finally scale.

— Olivier Debray, Co-founder & SVP Global Brands & Agencies, Smalk AI

AI answers are built on the work of publishers, yet the click that used to pay for that work is disappearing. The fix is not nostalgia for the old web — it is a new citation-based revenue stream for the content that fuels these engines. Building that economic loop for publishers is the reason I joined.

— Victor Charpin, Co-founder & Global SVP Publishers & Partnerships, Smalk AI

About Smalk AI

Smalk AI is an AI Search advertising platform connecting brands that need to appear inside AI-generated answers with the publishers whose content fuels those answers. The company operates native ad formats for AI agents (Generative Engine Advertising) and opens a new citation-based revenue stream for publishers in the agentic-web era.