Fluency Secures $40M Series A, Funded by Integrity Growth Partners
Fluency will leverage the new investment to enhance its automation and agentic AI capabilities, as well as accelerate new integrations with publisher and technology partners.
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Fluency, the Digital Advertising Operating System (OS) for scaling paid media operations across all major channels, has announced the close of its $40M Series A, funded by Integrity Growth Partners (IGP).
Founded in 2017, Fluency centralises all major aspects of digital advertising execution and management into a single solution. This enables agencies and brands to automate and leverage AI on paid media across walled gardens and the open web at a scale not achievable through endless hiring, outsourcing or tools.
Fluency currently powers nearly $3B in annual media spend and 250,000+ monthly campaigns. The platform is used by agencies and brands, including Fortune 500 organisations. These companies run campaigns for over 50,000 local businesses by automating the most time-consuming campaign execution processes.
Over the past three decades, digital advertising has reached a tipping point of complexity, defined by increasingly fragmented systems and technologies, an abundance of data, error-prone manual management and costly internal tooling.
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Fluency’s founding team lived these problems firsthand in the early 2000s, when they built an in-house adtech solution to solve them for their first company, Dealer.com (sold for $1.1B in 2014).
That solution was the precursor to what has since become the ad industry’s first Digital Advertising OS. Fluency now serves as the system of record for agencies and brands that rely on it to launch campaigns in minutes and manage massive portfolios in up to 90% less time.
Fluency will leverage the new investment to enhance its automation and agentic AI capabilities, as well as accelerate new integrations with publisher and technology partners. As a result, clients can execute paid ad programs across search, social and programmatic channels at unprecedented speed and scale.
Controlled and governed within its closed-walled system, Fluency’s growing agentic AI capabilities will act as digital workforce multipliers for clients, autonomously overseeing key workflows across its Digital Advertising OS.
These efforts will build on the platform’s existing automation and AI capabilities, which automate the work streams that account for the majority of the burden and time.
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These include changing ads dynamically across channels without human intervention, managing complex media budgets, creating copy, images and videos, running and optimising multiple campaigns simultaneously–often across hundreds of locations, reporting on and analysing performance, and engaging with clients and stakeholders through a single system of record.
Fluency is working toward a goal of managing at least 10% of the trillion dollars spent globally on digital advertising each year. Other priorities on its roadmap include introducing agency-client collaboration tools and enhancing its publisher and technology integrations.
“Our clients are accountable for delivering multichannel advertising, often across hundreds of brands and thousands of locations. It’s impossible for humans alone to manage the level of complexity this requires, no less scale it efficiently,” said Mike Lane, CEO of Fluency.
“Understanding and solving this problem requires a team that has not only been on the front lines of ad operations, but also has foresight into where the industry’s going and hindsight into how it’s already evolved.”
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“We’ll look to IGP as a trusted partner whose experience, just as much as its integrity and values, will be critical to our growth as we embark on the next stage of our work.”
IGP is a growth equity firm specialising in founder-led, bootstrapped technology companies. Fluency will continue to operate independently and under the leadership of its founding team. IGP will join Fluency’s board as a thought partner.
“There’s no lack of technology or innovation in the adtech space, but Fluency’s OS has achieved something that other companies have only attempted,” said Ryan Anderson, Managing Partner and Co-Founder at IGP.
“Rather than taking a ‘swiss army knife’ approach to bringing together common functionality into a single platform, they’ve elegantly woven together entire multi-step processes to streamline operations that have simply become untenable
“We’re proud to back a company that has already scaled organically on the merit of its technology and deep industry expertise, and look forward to amplifying their journey to leading the industry forward.”
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