Co-Founder and CEO at Zeta Global
Building Zeta Global into a major publicly traded marketing cloud powered by proprietary identity data and AI, and for being a serial entrepreneur who has repeatedly scaled data-driven marketing businesses from startup to public markets.
Last updated Feb 27, 2026 by AI Enrichment
David Steinberg is best known as the Co-Founder and CEO of Zeta Global, a publicly traded marketing technology company he has built into one of the largest independent marketing clouds competing directly with Adobe, Salesforce, and Oracle. Under his leadership, Zeta went public on the NYSE in June 2021 and has grown to serve hundreds of Fortune 1000 brands with AI-powered identity resolution, customer intelligence, and omnichannel marketing solutions. Steinberg has been a central figure in advancing the use of machine learning and proprietary first-party data as the advertising industry navigates the deprecation of third-party cookies and evolving privacy regulations. Before Zeta, Steinberg demonstrated a consistent pattern of building large-scale digital businesses from the ground up. He founded InPhonic in 1997, which grew into one of the largest online retailers of wireless phones and services and went public on NASDAQ in 2004. He subsequently founded XL Marketing, a direct marketing and data company that was later acquired and became the foundation for what would evolve into Zeta Global. His entrepreneurial track record spans nearly three decades of building companies at the intersection of data, technology, and marketing. Steinberg is widely regarded as a thought leader on the future of marketing technology, identity resolution, and AI-driven personalization. He is a frequent speaker at major industry conferences and a vocal advocate for the role of first-party data and artificial intelligence in replacing legacy targeting infrastructure. His ability to raise capital, execute acquisitions, and scale enterprise software businesses has made him one of the most prominent operator-entrepreneurs in the AdTech and MarTech landscape.
XL Marketing (2009-2014)
InPhonic / Simplexity (1997-2008)