Fluency, a Vermont-based adtech company, has secured a $40 million Series A investment from Integrity Growth Partners to enhance its AI-powered digital advertising platform. The company, which manages approximately $3 billion in annual ad spend for major brands and agencies including Cox Automotive, Innocean, and The Johnson Group, is positioning itself as a comprehensive operating system for digital advertising campaigns.
Founded in 2017 in Burlington, Vermont, Fluency created a unified platform that connects to multiple advertising platforms’ APIs—including Meta, TikTok, Google, and various demand-side platforms (DSPs)—allowing marketers to manage campaigns through a single interface. CEO Mike Lane explained that the platform aims to simplify the complex, time-consuming process of managing digital ads across multiple platforms, similar to how HubSpot and Salesforce revolutionized the CRM space.
The company’s competitive landscape includes established players like Hootsuite, Smartly, and Sprinklr, though Fluency differentiates itself by serving a broader range of advertisers beyond just large enterprises. The platform addresses a critical pain point in digital advertising: marketers typically juggle multiple “point solutions” that don’t integrate with each other, creating compliance issues and performance challenges.
The Series A funding will specifically focus on developing agentic AI capabilities—autonomous AI agents that can independently manage and optimize digital ad campaigns. These AI agents could automatically swap out ad creatives or copy with better-performing versions without human intervention. Fluency leverages Amazon’s Bedrock generative AI models, along with Anthropic’s Claude and Google’s Gemini, to power these capabilities.
Lane emphasized that effective agentic AI for digital advertising requires robust frameworks, connections to all major media platforms, and integration into a single system—factors he believes position Fluency as “the premium platform for agentic” AI in the digital ads space. According to Fluency’s pitch deck, the global ad spend market is expected to exceed $1 trillion by 2027, with the company’s serviceable addressable market projected to reach $6.4 billion by 2028, growing at an 11% compound annual growth rate.
Key Quotes
It takes a lot of people, and hours, and button clicking to be able to effectively execute your advertising.
Fluency CEO Mike Lane explained the core problem his platform addresses—the time-intensive, manual nature of managing digital advertising campaigns across multiple platforms. This quote underscores why AI automation is becoming essential in the adtech space.
help simplify and streamline that, much like HubSpot or Salesforce
Lane positioned Fluency’s platform as the digital advertising equivalent of major CRM platforms, suggesting the company aims to become the industry-standard operating system for ad campaign management, powered by AI capabilities.
the premium platform for agentic
Lane asserted that Fluency’s integrated approach—combining robust frameworks, connections to major media platforms, and a unified system—positions the company to lead in agentic AI for digital advertising, highlighting the strategic importance of this $40 million investment.
Our Take
Fluency’s $40 million raise represents a strategic bet on agentic AI becoming the dominant paradigm in digital advertising management. What’s particularly noteworthy is the company’s multi-model AI approach, leveraging Amazon Bedrock, Anthropic’s Claude, and Google’s Gemini rather than relying on a single provider. This hedging strategy suggests sophisticated thinking about AI infrastructure and vendor lock-in risks.
The timing is significant—as digital ad spend approaches $1 trillion globally, the operational complexity of managing campaigns has become unsustainable without AI automation. However, the real test will be whether autonomous AI agents can truly deliver better performance than human strategists, or if they’ll require extensive human oversight that negates efficiency gains. The company’s claim of managing $3 billion in ad spend provides a substantial testing ground for these AI capabilities, but the transition from AI-assisted to truly autonomous campaign management remains unproven at scale.
Why This Matters
This funding announcement signals a significant shift in how AI automation is transforming the digital advertising industry. As marketing budgets increasingly shift from traditional to digital channels, the complexity of managing campaigns across multiple platforms has become a major operational challenge for brands and agencies. Fluency’s focus on agentic AI—autonomous systems that can make decisions and take actions without human intervention—represents the next evolution in marketing technology.
The investment comes at a critical time when the digital advertising ecosystem is fragmenting across platforms while simultaneously consolidating spend among major players like Google and Meta. By creating a unified operating system powered by AI agents, Fluency addresses both the efficiency crisis facing marketers and the growing demand for automation in campaign management.
The broader implications extend beyond just operational efficiency. As AI agents become more sophisticated in managing ad campaigns, this could fundamentally reshape marketing roles, reduce the need for manual campaign management, and democratize access to advanced advertising capabilities for smaller agencies and brands. The company’s use of multiple AI models (Amazon Bedrock, Claude, Gemini) also demonstrates the emerging trend of multi-model AI strategies in enterprise applications.
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Source: https://www.businessinsider.com/pitch-deck-fluency-series-a-agentic-ai-adtech-platform-2025-12