One of Zeta Global's two founders was John Sculley, the former Apple CEO best known for the 1985 fight that pushed Steve Jobs out. The other, David Steinberg, ran the company. They started it in 2007 as XL Marketing and built it into a marketing cloud that sold brands data on what consumers wanted. When Zeta went public in June 2021, it had to cut the size of its offering and price at the bottom of its range.

From XL Marketing to Zeta

Steinberg and Sculley founded the company in New York in 2007. The bet was that marketers would pay for software tied to a large store of data on consumers, plus the tools to act on it. Zeta bought companies to grow that data and its email and ad tools. It renamed itself Zeta Global along the way. Steinberg runs it as CEO.

A Small Offering, Then Growth

Zeta priced a downsized offering at $10 a share on June 9, 2021, the low end of its range. The stock closed its first day on the New York Stock Exchange down 11 percent. Revenue kept growing, and in fiscal 2025 it reached $1.3 billion. In October 2025 Zeta launched Athena, an AI agent for marketers. It still trades on the NYSE under ZETA.

Cover: Orders of Architecture, Greek Doric Order from the Parthenon, Elevation, Carl (Charles) J. Furst. Art Institute of Chicago, public domain. Chosen for a Greek Doric order (zeta, the Greek letter).