Fluency has raised a $40 million Series A round funded by Integrity Growth Partners as the company expands what it describes as a Digital Advertising Operating System designed to help agencies and brands scale paid media operations across primary channels. The Burlington, Vermont-based company said the financing will support broader adoption of its platform, which centralizes digital advertising execution and management in a single system that connects channels, data, and processes, reducing manual work and operational complexity.
Founded in 2017, Fluency said its platform is used to automate paid media across walled gardens and the open web in ways that are difficult to achieve through additional hiring, outsourcing or point tools. The company said it currently powers nearly $3 billion in annual media spend and supports more than 250,000 monthly campaigns. Fluency added that its agency and brand customers run campaigns for more than 50,000 local businesses by automating time-consuming campaign execution tasks.
Fluency positioned its product as a response to increasing complexity in digital advertising driven by fragmented systems, growing data volumes, and manual management that can introduce errors and require costly internal tooling. The company said its founding team encountered these challenges earlier in their careers and built an in-house adtech solution for Dealer.com, which was later sold for $1.1 billion in 2014. Fluency said that the early system became the precursor to the platform it now markets as the ad industry’s first Digital Advertising Operating System, and that it now serves as a system of record for agencies and brands that use it to launch campaigns in minutes and manage large portfolios in significantly less time.
The company said it will use the Series A proceeds to enhance automation and agentic AI capabilities and to accelerate integrations with publisher and technology partners. Fluency said these upgrades are intended to help clients execute paid advertising programs across search, social, and programmatic channels with greater speed and scale, with agentic AI operating as a digital workforce multiplier inside what the company described as a controlled and governed closed-walled system.
Fluency said its existing automation and AI capabilities already support a range of workflows including dynamically changing ads across channels without human intervention, managing complex media budgets, generating creative assets such as copy, images and videos, running and optimizing multiple campaigns simultaneously across large multi location portfolios, reporting and performance analysis, and engaging with clients and stakeholders through a single system of record.
The company said it is working toward a longer-term goal of managing at least 10 percent of the roughly $1 trillion spent each year globally on digital advertising. Fluency also said its product roadmap includes adding agency client collaboration tools and expanding publisher and technology integrations.
Integrity Growth Partners is a growth equity firm focused on founder-led, bootstrapped technology companies. Fluency said it will continue operating independently under its founding team’s leadership and that Integrity Growth Partners will join Fluency’s board.
KEY QUOTES:
“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. 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.”
Mike Lane, CEO Of Fluency
“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. 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,” said Ryan Anderson, Managing Partner and Co-Founder at IGP. “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.”
Ryan Anderson, Managing Partner And Co-Founder At Integrity Growth Partners
