Some founders are relentless. Mike Hahn is one of them.
Over the past two decades, Mike has built five startups, completed multiple exits, and held intrapreneurial roles—all while demonstrating a rare tenacity to keep pushing, not for headlines or capital, but because he genuinely loves solving hard problems. With Vaudit, his sixth venture, Mike is applying everything he’s learned to build a more transparent and accountable digital advertising ecosystem.
The Hidden Leak in Ad Spend
Today, advertisers are spending more per click than ever. Yet a surprising portion of that spend never reaches real, verified users. During early customer discovery, Mike and his team uncovered that a large share of digital ad budgets was leaking into non-compliant, invalid traffic before it ever hit the final invoice. The lack of real-time auditing tools made this invisible to most.
Vaudit was born to address this head-on. By introducing a pre-bill audit layer, it helps advertisers reclaim wasted spend and restore integrity to the funnel. In a market where trust is assumed but rarely verified, this solution hits a nerve. In one case, an early customer discovered double-digit discrepancies, something they had never seen before.
Humble Beginnings, Global Impact
Mike’s story begins in a trailer park in Indiana, the son of very young parents in a low-income household. Alongside his two brothers, he relied on athletic scholarships just to afford college. But when a serious injury ended his American football career, Mike was forced to pivot, redirecting all his energy toward entrepreneurship.
That shift led to a surprise introduction to tech, thanks to a referral from his brother. He landed an entry-level role at Oracle, where he quickly made his mark, designing a new go-to-market model that would scale into a global revenue engine. In just three years, he rose to lead a team of over a thousand people.
He left to solve what he saw as the next big inefficiency, client onboarding, by building a streamlined implementation platform. Oracle later brought that solution back in-house. At a legacy marketing firm, he led the digital transformation, developing new products and scaling a national franchise business. Later, he founded a data platform acquired by a global marketplace.
After years of building in the U.S., Mike began exploring opportunities abroad. Through a mentorship role with PwC advising startup founders in Shanghai, he was exposed to the fast-growing innovation landscape across Asia. It was during this time that he recognized the immense, untapped potential of Southeast Asia and identified Vietnam and Thailand as rising hubs of technological excellence, an ideal launchpad for his next venture.
He went on to build a GenAI-native intent engine, successfully leading the company through product-market fit and into its growth phase. But Mike wasn’t done. He had identified yet another blind spot—a hidden inefficiency quietly draining ad budgets at scale. That insight pulled him back into the arena, ready to take on his next big challenge.
Through each chapter, a pattern emerges: Mike spots overlooked friction and builds systems to remove it. Not once, but repeatedly.
Rebuilding Trust in Digital Advertising
Digital advertising is a $600B+ industry running on assumed trust and partial verification. Small and mid-sized businesses, especially, lack tools to confirm what they’re paying for. As regulatory pressure grows and platform opacity deepens, the need for audit-grade visibility has never been clearer.
Mike has proven he can find product–market fit, scale meaningful solutions, and navigate uncertainty with clarity. With Vaudit, he’s channeling that experience into one of the most overlooked pain points in modern marketing. His vision is matched by a magnetic leadership style—so compelling that it drew AppWorks’ most charismatic principal, Jun, to join him full-time in building the company. It’s not often you see a VC trade the investor’s seat for a founder’s desk, and even less common to find a founder who can inspire that move. Since AppWorks’ pre-product investment in 2023, Jun has been side by side with Mike, helping bring Vaudit to life. We feel fortunate to back a founder whose blend of execution, insight, and leadership is exactly what it takes to build this missing layer of accountability.
We’re proud to support Mike in this next chapter.
