The Fluency team, from left: Mike Lane, CEO; Brian McVey, chief revenue officer; Eric Mayhew, president; and Scott Gale, chief technology officer.
Aaron Barton
Adtech company Fluency automates the process by which agencies and brands run digital ads.
It provides a streamlined workflow to manage campaigns across Meta, Google, TikTok, and more.
The startup just raised a $40 million Series A investment, led by Integrity Growth Partners.
Adtech company Fluency has built a platform that helps brands and agencies automate their campaigns across Meta, TikTok, Google, and other platforms. Now, it aims to introduce AI agents to the mix.
Large brands and agencies typically manage campaigns across multiple platforms and ad buying tools, known as demand-side platforms, each with separate logins and interfaces.
Founded in 2017 in Burlington, Vermont, Fluency created what it describes as a digital advertising operating system. It connects to the various platforms' application programming interfaces (APIs) and lets its customers manage their digital ads using a single workflow.
"It takes a lot of people, and hours, and button clicking to be able to effectively execute your advertising," Fluency CEO Mike Lane said in an interview with Business Insider.
He added that Fluency wanted to "help simplify and streamline that, much like HubSpot or Salesforce" did in the customer relationship management (CRM) space. Fluency's competitor set includes other campaign management and ad automation tools, such as Hootsuite, Smartly, and Sprinklr, though these companies tend to cater to larger advertisers and agencies.
The company said it manages around $3 billion in annual ad spend for brands and agencies, including Cox Automotive, Innocean, and The Johnson Group.
Fluency is set to announce on Tuesday that it has raised a $40 million Series A investment round, led and fully funded by Integrity Growth Partners.
Fluency said it plans to invest the funds in enhancing its agentic AI capabilities, which can autonomously oversee marketers' digital ad campaigns. This could mean AI agents automatically swapping out ad creatives or copy with better-performing versions, for example.
Fluency mostly uses Amazon's Bedrock generative AI models, as well as Anthropic's Claude and Google's Gemini, the company said.
Lane said that for agentic AI to work effectively for a marketer's digital advertising, the AI needs robust frameworks and structures to operate within, connections to all major media platforms, and for everything to be integrated into a single system.
He said these factors make Fluency well-positioned to be "the premium platform for agentic" AI in the digital ads space.
Check out the pitch deck Fluency used to secure its $40 million Series A investment, shared exclusively with Business Insider. Some of the slides have been omitted or redacted.
Fluency describes itself as the 'digital advertising operating system.'
Fluency
Its platform uses artificial intelligence to help agencies and brands manage digital ads.
Fluency
Fluency says it manages around $3 billion in annual ad spend.
Fluency
Fluency says it's well-positioned in the digital ad market.
Fluency
Fluency says marketer budgets are shifting from analog to digital. There's also a proliferation of new channels, although spending is concentrated among the major platforms, such as Google and Meta.
Complexity creates challenges for marketers.
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Fluency says marketers often use "point solutions" that don't interact with each other, which can also bring in issues around compliance and performance.
Fluency further outlines the challenges.
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Fluency says ad strategists often have to cobble together several different tech solutions to handle tasks like targeting or reviewing campaign performance.
Fluency explains how it addresses the challenges.
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Fluency's platform aims to address these concerns as a kind of "one-stop shop" across various channels.
Fluency says its platform makes marketers' digital advertising more efficient.
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Its founding team built an in-house adtech solution for their first company, Dealer.com.
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Dealer.com was acquired by Dealertrack Technologies in 2014 for approximately $1 billion.
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Fluency lists some of its key attributes.
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Those attributes include a blue-chip client base and high customer-retention rates.
Fluency outlines the size of the digital ad market.
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Global ad spend is expected to cross $1 trillion in 2027, according to the consulting firm Winterberry Group.
Brands are shifting more of their digital advertising in-house.
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Fluency describes the evolving agency landscape.
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There's been a shift in budgets from big agency holding companies to independent agencies, though smaller firms have constrained resources, Fluency says.
Fluency outlines the market opportunity.
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Fluency says its "serviceable addressable market" is expected to grow at a compound annual growth rate of 11%, reaching $6.4 billion by 2028.
This slide compares Fluency to other adtech.
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Fluency says its platform serves agencies and brands better than agency-developed tech, in-house channel management, legacy omni-channel tools, and point solutions.
Fluency describes how its operating system connects.
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The slide showcases how the Fluency platform integrates a marketer's own data, big media platforms, and DSPs using AI automation to manage campaigns and assess their performance.
Fluency says its platform delivers returns for clients.
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Fluency says its tools can save customers time, improve ad performance, and boost their revenue.