In a landmark moment for ad-tech, San Francisco-based startup AdsGency has secured $12 million in seed funding, led by XYZ Venture Capital, with participation from Streamlined Ventures, HF0 and Hat‑Trick Capital. Founded in 2023, AdsGency is setting out to become the industry’s first agentic ad agency, automating the full performance-marketing workflow using large-language-model powered agents.
Under the leadership of founder and CEO Bolbi Liu, AdsGency offers advertisers an end-to-end platform that handles creative strategy, competitive analysis, content generation, ad placement across major channels (including Google, TikTok, Reddit, Instagram and Pinterest), and real-time performance tracking and optimisation—all seamlessly integrated with enterprise tools such as Snowflake and Salesforce.
The company reports strong client traction—among its users are TAL Education (3× ROAS, 650 % revenue growth), Halliday (US $3.3 m with 13× ROAS) and Mobvoi (profit up more than 10×). One CMO explained: “After working together for just three months, we decided to increase our ad budget on the platform by 10× because we’ve experienced such incredible results – way beyond what we saw with our prior agency.”
The seed round will primarily be deployed to hire top-engineering talent and expand AdsGency’s go-to-market operations worldwide—a necessary push, given the fragmented US$400 billion global digital-advertising-agency market it is targeting. “We’re not just another content-generation platform,” Liu said. “Even the most beautiful 8K video ad won’t work if your strategy, targeting, and execution are a miss. We built AdsGency to automate and connect the pieces of the puzzle so that advertisers can access the precision, insights and speed needed for unmatched ROI.”
Editorial Outlook
AdsGency’s raise is significant for two reasons. First, it signals that investors are backing agentic AI—systems that don’t simply assist humans but actually execute complex workflows—as the next frontier in digital marketing. Unlike previous waves of AI ad tools that focused narrowly on creative generation, AdsGency claims to span strategy through execution, bridging the gap between data, automation and performance.
Second, the startup is going after scale from day one—enterprise clients, global channels, cross-platform complexity—rather than the easier SMB segment. That ambition raises the stakes: if AdsGency succeeds, it could challenge the very business model of traditional agencies and martech stacks. However, with ambition comes risk. The company must maintain the integrity of algorithmic decision-making, ensure transparency in ROI attribution, and adapt to evolving regulatory demands around AI and advertising.
In short, AdsGency is a startup to watch—not just for the $12 million headline, but for what it may herald: a moment when “AI-agency” becomes a category in its own right, and performance marketing shifts from human-in-the-loop to human-on-the-loop.
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