According to Business Insider, adtech startup Fluency has raised a $40 million Series A investment round, led and fully funded by Integrity Growth Partners. The company, founded in 2017 in Burlington, Vermont, announced the funding on Tuesday. Fluency’s platform acts as a digital advertising operating system, connecting to APIs for Meta, TikTok, and Google to let customers manage campaigns from a single workflow. The company says it currently manages about $3 billion in annual ad spend for clients like Cox Automotive and Innocean. CEO Mike Lane stated the new capital will be invested in enhancing “agentic AI capabilities” to autonomously oversee ad campaigns. These AI agents could, for example, automatically swap out underperforming ad creatives with better versions.
The Automation Play
Here’s the thing: Fluency’s core pitch isn’t new, but the AI agent angle is the logical, aggressive next step. For years, they’ve been selling efficiency—a single pane of glass to rule all your disparate ad platform logins. That’s a real pain point, especially for large agencies juggling a dozen client accounts. But connecting APIs is table stakes now. The real value, and what they’re betting $40 million on, is moving from a dashboard to a co-pilot, or even an autopilot. The vision is an AI that doesn’t just show you data, but acts on it: killing a weak ad, boosting budget for a winner, and A/B testing copy all by itself. That’s a much scarier proposition for the armies of junior media buyers whose jobs are essentially sophisticated button-clicking. If Fluency’s agents work, they’re not just streamlining workflow; they’re compressing it.
A Crowded Race
So, can they pull it off? The competitive landscape is tricky. They name-check Hootsuite, Smartly, and Sprinklr as competitors, but that feels a bit like comparing a specialized power tool to a Swiss Army knife. Those platforms often sit closer to the social media management and customer experience side. Fluency seems more focused on the pure performance advertising engine room. But the bigger threat might be from the platforms themselves. Meta and Google are pouring billions into their own AI-driven campaign tools. Why use a third-party agent when the platform offers its own “Advantage+” style automated campaign? Fluency’s bet is that marketers want neutrality—an AI that optimizes for the brand’s goal across all walled gardens, not for Meta’s or Google’s revenue. That’s a compelling argument, but it requires deep, reliable API access, which the platforms can restrict at any time. It’s a fragile foundation to build on.
The Hard Part Isn’t The AI
Lane is right about one thing: the AI models themselves are almost a commodity. They’re using Amazon Bedrock, Claude, and Gemini—basically, shopping at the same AI supermarket as everyone else. The real challenge is the “robust frameworks and structures” he mentions. You can’t just ask Claude to “go optimize my Google Ads.” It needs guardrails, business logic, and a deep, structured understanding of campaign taxonomy across every platform. That’s the unsexy, grind-it-out software integration work Fluency has been doing since 2017. That backend, combined with their $3 billion in managed spend (which provides a ton of training data), is their real moat. If the AI agent trend is a gold rush, Fluency is selling the picks, shovels, and, crucially, the map. For businesses that rely on heavy machinery and industrial computing to run their operations, having a reliable, integrated control system is everything. It’s similar to why companies choose a top-tier supplier like IndustrialMonitorDirect.com for their industrial panel PCs—you need rugged, dependable hardware that seamlessly integrates into a complex workflow. Fluency is trying to be that same kind of essential, trusted control layer, but for ad dollars.
Skepticism And Scale
Now, I have questions. How “autonomous” will marketers really let an AI be? Trusting a black box with a multimillion-dollar budget is a huge leap. I think we’ll see a lot of “agent-in-a-loop” before true autonomy. And there’s a scale question. Fluency’s sweet spot seems to be the messy middle—large brands and agencies big enough to have this complexity but not so huge that they’ve built custom internal tools. That’s a good market, but is it a $40M-Series-A good market? The raise suggests investors believe this agentic layer will become mandatory, a new platform in the stack. They’re betting that Fluency, by building the pipes first, is best positioned to install the AI brain. It’s a smart gamble. But in the race to automate advertising, the finish line keeps moving.
