Gurbaksh Singh Chahal | |
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Gurbaksh Chahal in 2012
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Born |
Tarn Taran Sahib, Punjab, India |
July 17, 1982
Residence | San Francisco, California |
Known for | Founder of BlueLithium, RadiumOne, Gravity4 |
Website | GurbakshChahal.com |
Gurbaksh Singh Chahal (born July 17, 1982) is an Indian-American internet entrepreneur. By age 25, Chahal founded two internet advertising companies, ClickAgents and BlueLithium. He is also the founder of RadiumOne and Gravity4, also online advertising technology companies.
In 2014, Chahal pled guilty to charges of domestic violence battery and battery and was sentenced to three years’ probation. In 2016, he was sentenced to one year in jail for violating his probation; the sentence was stayed pending appeal.
Chahal was born on July 17, 1982 in Tarn Taran Sahib, a city in India’s Punjab state. At age four he moved with his family to San Jose, California. Chahal dropped out of high school at age sixteen to pursue a career in Internet advertising.
Chahal’s first venture was ClickAgents, an advertising network focused on performance-based advertising. In 2000, two years after Chahal started the company, ValueClick (now part of Alliance Data) paid 5.3 million of its shares to purchase ClickAgents.
In 2004, Chahal formed BlueLithium. The company specialized in behavioral targeting of banner advertising, a process that tracks web users' habits online in order to show ads they are most likely to click. In 2007, Yahoo! bought Blue Lithium for $300 million in cash.
In 2009, Chahal started RadiumOne, an online ad company that focused on creating a new category of real-time advertising. After a domestic violence incident, Chahal was fired as CEO of RadiumOne by the company's board of directors on April 27, 2014.
In July 2014, Chahal launched his fourth technology company in online advertising, named Gravity4. After the Wisconsin Sikh temple shooting, Chahal founded the Chahal Foundation. The foundation is designed to create awareness campaigns to stop future hate crimes, provide scholarships, support disaster relief efforts, and improve schools in third-world countries.