Home Innovation AdTech Kubient CEO Paul Roberts Sente...

Kubient CEO Paul Roberts Sentenced for $1.3 Million Financial Fraud

AdTech

Business Honor
25 March, 2025

Paul Roberts was sentenced in prison for inflating Kubient's financial statements and misleading investors.

Kubient is a marketing agency in New York that offers a transparent programmatic environment with patented real-time bidding (RTB) marketplace automation and pre-bid ad fraud detection driven by artificial intelligence. According to reports, Kubient and another unidentified business fabricated a $1.3 million transaction in order to inflate financial statements. To make the business appear more successful, Roberts falsified financial documents and a phony test of Kubient's Kubient Artificial Intelligence (KAI) software.

Founded in 2017, the firm specializes in programmatic advertising and fraud detection. It created the real-time ad marketplace Audience Cloud and KAI, a solution that it said could stop ad fraud. The firm filed for bankruptcy and was delisted from the NASDAQ before the end of 2023, despite having risen over $32.5 million when it became public in 2020. The CFO and the chair of the audit committee knew about the fraud before the company's IPO, but they decided not to alert investors.

US District Judge Jennifer L. Rochon of the Southern District of New York rendered the ruling. The SEC charged Roberts, Kubient's CFO, and the audit committee chair with failing to take action on the fraud before the secondary public offering. Matthew Podolsk, the acting US attorney, stated that Paul Roberts fabricated financial records. Ironically, he fooled investors and auditors about the company's revenue and its flagship product, an AI-powered tool meant to identify fraud in the field of digital advertising.