Opal, a SaaS platform designed to automate agency back-office operations, announced $1.5 million in pre-seed funding. Founders Co-op led the funding round with support from Exit North Ventures. This funding will advance the development of “Opal Spend,” an ad-spend platform built to seamlessly connect ad-spend with accounting, invoicing, and contract management.
Launched in 2024 by Alex Steele to solve billing headaches at his media buying agency Easy Agency, Opal provides an all-in-one platform that replaces fragmented, horizontal tools. Since launching, the company has grown 400% and attracted top engineering talent, including a team of former X engineers. And by automating tedious and repetitive workflows into a single platform, Opal enables agencies to close deals faster and focus on creating value for clients.
This funding will accelerate Opal’s mission and bring to market Opal Spend, the industry’s first purpose-built ad-spend solution that seamlessly integrates ad spend, accounting, and invoicing in one unified system. And Opal Spend eliminates the tradeoff agencies face between earning cashback and managing credit risk by drawing funds directly from client accounts instead of extending credit.
This enables agencies to benefit from cashback without financial exposure while reducing overall economic risk. Additionally, the system automatically updates virtual card information across major advertising platforms, including Meta, Google, Apple, Amazon, etc.
This new approach tackles many shortcomings in existing ad spend solutions, such as disorganized account statements, lack of customer-segmented cards, and insufficient finance automation. And by housing all these capabilities under one roof, agencies gain streamlined workflows that eliminate manual data entry, expedite invoicing, and simplify reporting—while also capturing cash-back rewards as a new profit source. Larger advertisers can use the same tools to retain budget ownership and maintain comprehensive visibility over their expenditures and campaign performance.
With the new funding round, Opal plans to expand its capabilities, deepen platform integrations, and hire across engineering, product, and customer success teams. The company’s long-term vision is to become the premier financial partner for media and creative agencies, unifying spend management, invoicing, and data-driven optimization for a frictionless back-office experience.
KEY QUOTES:
“Opal is building the Shopify for agencies. Just like Shopify provides the back-end of an ecommerce business, Opal provides the operating system for agencies. Having led an agency for years, we constantly juggled multiple back-office tools that don’t talk to each other, so half of our back-office work was copying the same data over and over into different horizontal tools. We built Opal to be a modern financial backbone for agencies—one that reduces friction from contract creation all the way through invoicing and payment. With the launch of Opal Spend, we are putting everything—contracts, invoicing, payments, attribution—under one umbrella, reducing friction, speeding up revenue, and delivering a clearer picture of performance. All an agency should worry about is getting customers and serving them well. Opal makes that a reality.”
– Alex Steele, Founder and CEO of Opal
“I’ve seen firsthand how Alex’s determination and technical talent have shaped Opal into a game-changing financial platform. It’s not just streamlining day-to-day finances—it’s redefining how agencies and brands manage ad spending, and I’m excited to support Opal’s growth.”
– Ian Crosby, Head of Accounting Products at Mercury
