• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, September 12, 2017

Inderpal Bhandari, global chief data officer at IBM, has joined the Swoop Board of Directors. The search advertising platform for content announced the appointment Tuesday.

Bhandari brings experience in deep learning, data science, artificial intelligence, and cognitive computing. He previously held similar positions with Cambia Health Solutions, Express Scripts and Medco, and recently was named the U.S. Chief Data Officer of the Year for 2017 by the CDO Club.

Simeon Simeonov, who cofounded Swoop in 2011 with Ron Elwell, helps to lead a team of about 34 employees. He is a serial entrepreneur and former partner at Polaris Venture Partners, TechStars mentor, and founding CTO of Ghostery.   

Swoop mostly serves the automotive and the health industries -- two industries headed toward a flood of data. The company got its start by focusing on the concept of embedding search keywords into the copy posted on the website, so when Google and Bing crawl a site's webpages it can identify searched-for words. Now it's about data and transparency.

Ron Elwell, Swoop CEO, explains in a video how the company reversed engineered the concept of a search engine that crawls sites. Swoop's engine crawls the site to identify and retrieve the queries people search for on each page. Through this reverse engineering, Swoop created its business model.