Gravity raises $30.5 million to build an ad exchange for AI agents

Why it matters

Gravity is betting that AI assistants become both advertising inventory and buyers. Owning demand, supply and the exchange could give Gravity leverage if platforms accept ads built from conversation context.

Gravity, founded by Zach Oldham (@zachtheoldham) and Leo Martinez (@leojamartinez), has raised a $30.5 million Series A to build advertising infrastructure for AI chatbots and software agents. Business Insider reported on August 6th that Lightspeed Venture Partners and Committed Capital co-led the round, bringing Gravity's total funding to $38.5 million. (businessinsider.com)

The financing backs an attempt to establish Gravity as the intermediary between brands seeking space inside AI products and developers looking for an alternative to subscriptions. Gravity combines a demand-side platform for advertisers, a supply-side platform for AI developers and the exchange that runs between them. The San Francisco company also sells campaign creation, measurement and conversion-tracking tools. (businessinsider.com)

That full-stack structure is central to Oldham's pitch. A company controlling advertiser demand and developer inventory can gather performance data from both ends of each transaction, improve its matching system and make itself harder to replace as the network grows. Gravity still has to compete for both sides against established advertising platforms and new products from companies already embedded in marketers' budgets.

According to Business Insider, Gravity has placed text ads in AI assistants and chatbots including ChatGPT, Codebuff, EcoGPT, Daimon, Magneta, Runable and CTO.new. Advertisers using Gravity have included Best Buy, Target, Vercel and MongoDB. Those names establish early access to recognizable brands, though Gravity has not published revenue, campaign spending or conversion figures that would show how large those relationships are. (businessinsider.com)

From ad measurement to AI conversations

Oldham previously founded Flax Labs, an ecommerce growth agency built around software that attributed profit to individual ads. Flax Labs says he founded the business in 2020. On his personal site, Oldham writes that he bootstrapped Flax Labs into a 45-person services company and brand incubator before starting Gravity. (zachtheoldham.com)

That background explains Gravity's focus on the machinery behind advertising rather than a single consumer-facing ad format. The company's developer documentation offers SDK and API integrations for AI chats, coding assistants, search products and other applications. Gravity says an ad request runs alongside the application's model call, with its system matching an advertiser to the conversation, running an auction and returning creative for the developer to display. (trygravity.ai)

Gravity publicly bills advertisers on a cost-per-thousand-impressions model. Its technical documentation says the matching engine embeds recent messages, retrieves relevant campaigns, holds an auction and generates creative tailored to the conversation. The same documentation says richer contextual signals improve matching and attribution, making the handling of conversation data a core product issue as Gravity tries to persuade larger platforms to adopt its system. Gravity says its tracking pixels are first-party and do not share data across unrelated sites. (docs.trygravity.ai)

Martinez, Gravity's CTO, is responsible for the technical side of making those auctions fast and inexpensive enough to run inside a live conversation. In a customer case study, Inference.net said Gravity replaced a general-purpose 70-billion-parameter model with a specialized 1-billion-parameter model. Inference.net claimed the change cut inference costs by roughly 90% and reduced 99th-percentile latency from nearly two seconds to 351 milliseconds while serving millions of requests per day. Those performance figures come from Gravity's infrastructure provider rather than an independent benchmark. (inference.net)

Ads aimed at agents

Gravity is also testing what Oldham calls "agent-to-agent" advertising. Instead of displaying a sponsored message to a person, Gravity supplies a purchasing agent with product catalogs, features and current promotions when the agent is evaluating what to recommend. A request for shoes, for example, could prompt Gravity to provide the agent with relevant inventory from participating advertisers. (businessinsider.com)

The planned next step is transaction execution. Gravity wants to add payment integrations that let an agent complete a purchase after receiving user approval. That would move Gravity deeper into the transaction, connecting product discovery, advertising attribution and checkout rather than stopping after an impression or referral. It would also make disclosure and ranking rules consequential: an agent's recommendation may be shaped by paid inventory even when the user never encounters a conventional ad unit.

Oldham argues advertising can subsidize AI services and reduce the need for paid subscriptions. He has described Gravity's goal as "making intelligence free," applying the commercial model that funded search and social media to AI products. Gravity's current engineering job listing says the company serves millions of ads per day and identifies Caffeinated Capital and Basis Set Ventures as existing backers. Both operating scale and investor information on that page are company-supplied. (zachtheoldham.com)

The market Gravity is pursuing is expected to attract much larger competitors. WPP Media's 2026 midyear forecast projects generative search advertising revenue will exceed $100 billion globally by 2030. Gravity's wager is that independent infrastructure can capture part of that spending before the largest AI platforms consolidate buying, measurement and inventory within their own systems. (cdn.wpp.com)