Bolbi Liu's startup AdsGency just raised a $12 million seed investment round, led by XYZ Venture Capital.
Chloe Lyu
AdsGency is building what it describes as an agentic AI operating system for advertisers.Its platform uses AI to automate ad campaigns across platforms like Meta, Google, and TikTok.AdsGency just raised a $12 million seed investment round, led by XYZ Venture Capital.
Mark Zuckerberg, this year, set out a vision to entirely automate advertising, where brands can simply connect their bank account, set out the objective of their campaigns, and let Meta's artificial intelligence tech handle the rest.
San Francisco-based startup AdsGency wants to extend that vision to Google, TikTok, Reddit, Pinterest, and more.
AdsGency's operating system hosts multiple large language models and uses AI agents to automate the campaign planning process, which includes generating ads and placing them.
It also integrates marketers' first-party data, as well as third-party data and integrations with data and customer-relationship management platforms like Snowflake or Salesforce, to help track campaign performance in real time.
Founded in 2023, AdsGency's customers include the tech companies Mobvoi and Pika, as well as the Chinese company TAL Education.
On Monday, AdsGency said it had raised a $12 million seed funding round, led by XYZ Venture Capital. Streamlined Ventures, HF0, and Hat-Trick Capital also participated.
"AdsGency has shown such impressive growth because it really is the first functional alternative to bloated ad stacks," said Camille Ricketts, partner at XYZ Venture Capital, in a statement.
AdsGency said it will use the fresh funding to hire engineers, developers, and go-to-market experts to support the company's expansion. The company, which has raised $15 million in total, currently has a head count of 15.
The company is the latest in a wave of startups seeking to apply AI technology to simplify and streamline the ad buying process. However, while many of those startups focus on small and medium-sized businesses, AdsGency also aims to target enterprise clients.
"We want to disrupt the traditional ad agency," Bolbi Liu, AdsGency founder and CEO, told Business Insider in an interview.
Check out the pitch deck AdsGency used to secure its $12 million seed investment, shared exclusively with Business Insider. Some of the slides have been omitted or redacted.
AdsGency bills itself as "the first agentic OS for advertisers."
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Liu said businesses hate the fragmented process of buying ads.
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Ad-buying can be complicated and expensive — and it can be difficult to generate a return on ad spend.
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The $900 billion figure in this slide refers to the upper end of the 2024 valuations of public companies within the adtech market.
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AdsGency criticizes the manual process by which many ad campaigns are run.
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Bolbi Liu is AdsGency's founder.
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She previously helped build an in-house ad platform for the Chinese mobility app company Didi to manage its ad spend.
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Liu went on to work for Amazon Web Services.
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AWS didn't have an internal ad management platform, either. Liu helped build one, called WRP.
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Her experience made her realize there was a universal problem with managing advertising.
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AdGency says it has provable results.
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AdsGency helped the AI glasses startup Halliday raise $3.3 million in funding on Kickstarter.
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AdsGency said it improved Halliday's return on ad spend from 0.8X…
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…to 13X.
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AdsGency has worked with clients including Alibaba, Rho, and Mobvoi.
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AdsGency secured $7 million in contracted annual recurring revenue in the 12 months since launch.
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This slide details the AdsGency platform workflow and how it connects to the ad exchanges run by Google, Meta, and others.
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Customers can connect their own data and company information to the AdsGency platform.
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It lets users analyze the personas and profiles of their customer base.
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It turns that into audience segments to target with ads.
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AsGency then creates campaigns using its agentic workflow.
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This slide demonstrates how the platform might spin up a social media campaign.
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Customers can manage their entire campaigns within the platform.
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AdsGency says if AI can help manage processes in finance and legal…
