AI Search
By Joanna Gerber
Hot: Automating digital advertising with a centralized platform.
Not: Trying to bring that platform to market right as the COVID-19 pandemic struck the country.
Though, according to Mike Lane, CEO and co-founder of Fluency, the aforementioned platform, it wasn’t all bad.
Lane called the timing both “a blessing and a curse,” because although it created real challenges, it also spurred demand for efficiency and new tools built for a remote workforce.
That demand helped drive growth for the startup, which announced its $40 million Series A on Tuesday led and fully funded by Integrity Growth Partners.
Automation nation
Fluency positions itself as a DAOS, which stands for “digital advertising operating system” (as if the industry didn’t have enough acronyms already).
The goal was to develop an end-to-end advertising system, from creative development through to reporting, said Lane, so advertisers could adjust campaigns across channels through a centralized platform.
To make that possible, Fluency relies on automation, Lane said, using a customizable rule system called Blueprints that lets advertisers automate campaigns according to their own strategy.
For instance, a multifamily apartment advertiser in the housing space could set up a “blueprint” to boost ads when units open up and pull back once occupancy is high. They can also fine-tune how they target audiences, said Eric Mayhew, president and co-founder of Fluency, such as by neighborhood rather than by city or state.
Advertisers can also intervene at any point to make manual changes, Mayhew added, and receive automated reporting to see how their strategy is working.
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Designing the blueprint
Fluency plans to invest its new funding into AI and engineering to bring more automation into the platform so marketers can do more with fewer button clicks. It also plans to put some of the funding toward marketing.
The company has already been working on AI tools, including an agentic retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) component that users can prompt with specific questions, like how weather impacts performance. The RAG tool retrieves relevant data, analyzes the results, flags what’s working and suggests potential strategy changes.
The tool was born after one client requested a way to automate tweaks and changes based on RAG results rather than having to manually revise a blueprint – and Fluency obliged.
Now the AI can “retrieve its own data, understand the context and the user’s question, and then apply that change back to the automation engine,” said Mayhew.
All eyes ahead
Five years after going to market, in the midst of the AI boom, Fluency is ready to make some bigger changes.
Although Lane said Fluency has been profitable since 2020, the company has spent “every dime [it’s] ever made” on growth.
“Now,” he said, “we can step on the gas pedal a little harder.”
In addition to spending on R&D, Fluency will accelerate its hiring, mainly in engineering, product and AI. Lane estimates that Fluency’s team, which is just under 120 people today, should reach around 200 by the end of next year.
But there’s still a hurdle that Fluency needs to get over, which is that it takes a long time for brands and agencies to implement fully automated and AI-driven processes, Lane said. But Fluency is hoping to make the adoption process easier by incorporating it into the existing product, eliminating the need for advertisers to learn how to prompt an entirely new tool.
“After they get on board,” he said, “it’s hard to say you would go back.”
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