pubX raises US$5m as agent-to-agent ad push accelerates

Agentic ad platform pubX has raised US$5 million and acquired media quality and governance company Compliant, just weeks after launching its agent-to-agent advertising technology in Australia.

The Series A round, led by Chicago Ventures, will fund pubX's US expansion, build out its demand-side business for brands and agencies and accelerate development of buyer and seller agents capable of transacting directly with each other.

The deal follows pubX's Australian launch in September, when it appointed former Afterpay and Yahoo executive Andrew Gilbert (pictured) as country manager ANZ and positioned itself as one of a small number of companies globally already running fully agent-to-agent advertising campaigns.

Unlike much of the emerging agentic adtech market, which is adding AI layers to existing programmatic infrastructure, pubX is building infrastructure specifically for buyer and seller agents to transact directly.

Its technology is built on the open Ad Context Protocol (AdCP), with agents able to plan, buy, sell and optimise media. Clients determine the level of autonomy, including where human approval is required.

The acquisition of Compliant adds media quality and governance signals into that decision-making process, allowing agents to assess factors including data integrity and CTV quality before committing spend.

pubX CEO and co-founder Andrew Mole said agentic technology could complete a shift in media buying that began with programmatic two decades ago.

“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,” Mole said.

“For the first time, the infrastructure has caught up with what brands want to achieve with their advertising and how publishers want to sell.”

Compliant will retain its name and operate as a pubX company, with CEO Jamie Barnard also becoming president, global demand growth at pubX. Terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.

Barnard said incorporating Compliant's signals directly into agentic buying decisions could address one of the major hurdles facing autonomous media trading: trust.

“Inside pubX, those media quality and governance signals sit in the decision itself, so an agent weighs them before it buys,” Barnard said. “This is what gives each CMO the confidence to trust pubX’s agents.”

pubX said its technology is already being used by major publisher and agency groups to transact media globally.