HYDERABAD | 4 July 2026: Executing a critical infrastructure expansion ahead of a massive corporate consolidation, data collaboration enterprise LiveRamp has officially established its first India capability centre in Hyderabad. Located in the Aparna Technopolis complex within Hyderabad’s HITEC City, the facility is engineered to serve as a primary global hub for artificial intelligence, data science, and product development.

The operational scale-up coincides directly with the pending acquisition of the enterprise by French advertising holding conglomerate Publicis Groupe . In a move designed to secure proprietary data supply chains, Publicis has entered a definitive agreement to acquire LiveRamp in an all-cash transaction valued at $2.167 billion.

To build and sustain these advanced architectures, LiveRamp is heavily relying on its Hyderabad talent pool. The enterprise intends to hire over 100 specialized professionals in the coming 12 months, adding to an existing domestic workforce that already exceeds 250 employees. The immediate business significance lies in the geographical distribution of intellectual property: the fundamental software required to process global data collaboration, optimize media buying, and train the next generation of AI marketing agents is increasingly being architected from southern India.

KEY HIGHLIGHTS

Headquartered in Paris, Publicis Groupe operates as one of the world’s largest communications holding companies, employing over 114,000 professionals globally. The enterprise reported net revenue of €17.39 billion for 2025, operating with an industry-leading margin rate of 18.2 percent. While historically anchored by traditional creative agencies like Leo Burnett, the conglomerate’s technology portfolio is now heavily driven by data marketing firm Epsilon and enterprise transformation consultancy Publicis Sapient.

By acquiring San Francisco-based LiveRamp, Publicis absorbs a pure-play technology platform operating on a highly recurring Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) model. Prior to the aggressive scale-up of its Hyderabad hub, LiveRamp maintained a specialized global workforce of approximately 1,300 employees. The firm generated $813 million in total revenue for the fiscal year ending March 2026, with fixed subscription revenue accounting for $614 million of the total. LiveRamp’s core intellectual property focuses on cryptographic identity matching and secure data clean rooms, providing the underlying infrastructure for an interoperable network spanning over 25,000 publisher domains and 500 technology partners globally.

THE $2.16 BILLION DATA CO-CREATION STRATEGY

Addressing the corporate acquisition, Arthur Sadoun, Chairman and CEO of Publicis Groupe, detailed the long-term operational objectives.

The acquisition follows a period of intense pressure on global advertising holding companies to adapt their service portfolios. For decades, agencies relied on third-party cookies and broad demographic targeting. The modern regulatory landscape requires strict data privacy, forcing brands to rely on their own first-party data.

By acquiring LiveRamp, Publicis bridges the gap between fragmented corporate databases and executable marketing campaigns. LiveRamp provides deep expertise in data clean rooms and identity resolution. This specific capability allows distinct entities such as a major retailer and a streaming platform to match their customer lists securely and identify shared audiences without exposing personally identifiable information.

According to Publicis, the transaction builds upon its 2019 purchase of data marketing firm Epsilon. By combining Epsilon’s identity assets with LiveRamp’s collaborative networks, the acquiring firm aims to offer clients an end-to-end data ecosystem. The long-term objective is “data co-creation,” where brands generate proprietary datasets that can be used to train highly specialized large language models (LLMs) and deploy agentic AI to manage dynamic media buying.

ARCHITECTING AI FROM HITEC CITY: BEYOND AD OPERATIONS

The operational reality inside the new Hyderabad facility involves managing the digital architecture for global identity systems. While the enterprise already employs over 250 people in the country, the new office represents the company’s first consolidated physical hub in the market, transitioning from a distributed workforce to a centralized innovation engine.

The teams housed in Aparna Technopolis operate far beyond standard back-office campaign reporting. The engineering and product squads focus on complex data pipelining. Software developers anonymize massive daily transaction logs from global brands, structuring raw data so that algorithms can match encrypted digital profiles across publishers and technology platforms.

Discussing the regional scale-up, Sashi Binani, Chief Information Officer and Managing Director of India at LiveRamp, emphasized the importance of the local ecosystem to the firm’s global agility.

A critical focus for the new hires will be applied to artificial intelligence. Because the company operates as a neutral infrastructure layer for the advertising ecosystem, its data science teams in India are tasked with building the machine learning models that evaluate data accuracy, detect anomalies, and optimize match rates at a global scale. The facility also centralizes corporate functions, running global finance and customer success operations directly alongside the engineering units.

OUR ANALYSIS

The alignment of the $2.167 billion acquisition agreement and the Hyderabad capacity expansion reflect a defensive and offensive maneuver by Publicis within a rapidly consolidating market. As hyperscalers continue to dominate digital advertising through closed ecosystems, traditional agency holding companies are forced to build competing, interoperable data networks. Owning the mechanism that connects disparate datasets provides the acquiring entity with a distinct structural advantage.

Furthermore, the expansion of the Hyderabad center highlights India’s maturing role in the global advertising technology supply chain. The domestic capability ecosystem has evolved from executing manual ad operations to supplying the foundational engineering required for global AI deployments. Companies operating in the region are establishing India as a primary hub for specialized data operations, complex model evaluation, and software product management.

The transaction indicates that capability centers are now central to mergers and acquisitions strategy. When a holding company acquires a technology platform, the target’s offshore engineering capacity is evaluated as a primary operational asset. The ability of the Hyderabad node to rapidly scale product development directly enhances the integration readiness of the acquired firm.

CONCLUDING REMARKS

The expansion of LiveRamp’s engineering and artificial intelligence capabilities in Hyderabad, occurring against the backdrop of its pending $2.167 billion acquisition by Publicis Groupe, illustrates the rigorous technological restructuring of the global advertising sector. The physical footprint expansion indicates that managing enterprise marketing now requires deep, structural involvement in how consumer data is secured, matched, and activated through advanced algorithms. The latest development points to a corporate reality where securing high-quality engineering and data science capacity in India is a fundamental prerequisite for operating successfully in a privacy-first, AI-driven digital economy.

Curated by SSF Global

Tracking the shifts shaping GCCs, enterprise ecosystems, and the future of global business.

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SSF Global is a Global Community for Enterprise Function Leaders and serves as a research & advisory platform focused on Global Business Services (GBS), Global Capability Centres (GCCs), and the evolution of enterprise innovation in India and beyond. We track, publish, and partner in narratives that shape how capability centres transform into hubs of trust, intelligence, and sustainable growth. We also evaluate, assess and benchmark the GCCs for their performance, maturity and other parameters using our proprietary tools built from the knowledge gained from direct interaction with our members (GCCs & GBS).