pubX has raised $5 million in Series A funding led by Chicago Ventures and acquired media quality and governance company Compliant as it builds infrastructure designed for direct transactions between AI-powered advertising agents.
Compliant will retain its name and operate as a pubX company under CEO Jamie Barnard.
Barnard will also become President of Global Demand Growth at pubX, leading expansion across agencies, advertisers and the broader advertising buy-side.
pubX develops agents that plan, buy, sell and optimize advertising along with the infrastructure those agents use to transact directly.
The company initially focused on publishers, helping them price and sell advertising inventory.
Compliant has focused primarily on advertisers and agencies and was founded by former Unilever and Procter & Gamble executives.
Combining the companies gives pubX capabilities and relationships on both sides of the advertising transaction.
Its infrastructure is built on the open Ad Context Protocol and is designed to allow buyer and seller agents to interact from initial campaign brief through reporting.
pubX said governance, transparency and accountability are incorporated directly into its infrastructure, including checks on purchases and traceable agent decision-making.
Customers can determine how much autonomy the agents receive while maintaining approval rights at key stages.
The $5 million round will support U.S. expansion, development of pubX’s demand-side business, continued development of buyer and seller agents and integration of Compliant’s media quality and governance signals throughout the platform.
pubX plans to demonstrate a live agent-to-agent media purchase on October 7 during Advertising Week New York using a campaign for Reckitt’s Mucinex brand.
KEY QUOTES:
“Programmatic took this industry from fax machines and spreadsheets into more automated and real-time platforms in two short decades, and everything we’ve done since builds on that premise. Agents let us finish what was started. You tell them how you buy, you sign off where it matters, and every page of the brief gets read every single time. For the first time, the infrastructure has caught up with what brands want to achieve with their advertising and how publishers want to sell.”
Andrew Mole, CEO and Co-Founder of pubX
“For years, brands have searched for high-quality, high-performing inventory with real, relevant and engaged audiences. Compliant built the Data Integrity and CTV Quality Indexes so that they could do that with certainty rather than speculation. Inside pubX, those media quality and governance signals sit in the decision itself, so an agent weighs them before it buys. This is what gives each CMO the confidence to trust pubX’s agents.”
Jamie Barnard, CEO of Compliant and President of Global Demand Growth at pubX
“Every part of the advertising industry is asking how agents will improve buying and selling, and most answers so far are an agentic layer built on existing infrastructure. Co-founders Andrew Mole and Alex Rosen, pubX’s CTO, have built advertising infrastructure before, and this time they built it for agents from the start, on both sides of the transaction, with a publisher base that already trusts them and a design that keeps the client in control. That is a rare starting position, and the Compliant acquisition makes it stronger.”
Stuart Larkins, Co-Founder and General Partner at Chicago Ventures
“For a publisher, agentic buying is about discoverability. Buyer agents see the audiences and environments we actually have, backed by our first-party data, and that puts us in front of spend that never reached us before, in an environment we can win. It amplifies what our sales team already does well.”
Stephanie Mazzamaro, Head of Revenue and Data at Paradium.AI
“As advertising increasingly moves toward agentic buying, discoverability becomes critical. Publishers that invest in trusted content, engaged audiences, and brand-safe environments should be more visible to AI-powered buying platforms. The opportunity is to create a more transparent marketplace where quality is recognized and rewarded.”
Jason Taylor, Chief Revenue Officer of USA TODAY Co.
