Gravity raised $30.5M to place ads inside AI chatbots. Its next product targets the bots themselves.

Gravity, an adtech startup that places ads inside AI chatbots, raised a $30.5 million Series A co-led by Lightspeed Venture Partners and Committed Capital. The round brings total funding to $38.5 million. The company runs a full-stack ad platform: a demand-side platform for buying ads within AI chatbots and agents, a supply-side platform for developers to monetise their AI apps through ads, and an exchange connecting the two. Its advertiser clients include Best Buy, Target, Vercel, and MongoDB.

The startup places text-based ads inside ChatGPT and several other AI assistants, including Codebuff, EcoGPT, Daimon, Magneta, Runable, and CTO.new. OpenAI shifted ChatGPT’s ad model to cost-per-click in April and is building its own ad platform with partners like Adobe, StackAdapt, and Criteo. Gravity is betting it can carve out a position by owning the full stack and working across multiple AI platforms rather than being locked to one.

The more provocative product is agent-to-agent advertising, which human users never see. Advertisers provide Gravity with their product catalogue, including features and current promotions. When an AI shopping agent searches for a category, it receives a list of all relevant advertisers with detailed descriptions. “It helps enrich the buying decision,” cofounder Zach Oldham told Business Insider. Gravity plans to integrate direct payment so an agent can complete a purchase once a user approves.

The market projection is enormous. WPP Media estimates marketers will spend $100 billion on ads within generative AI search globally by 2030. OpenAI alone forecasts its ad business will hit $100 billion by the same year. Oldham thinks even that is conservative. ChatGPT introduced ads in February and crossed $100 million in annualised ad revenue within two months. The question for Gravity is whether a small independent platform can build real network effects in a market where Google already runs the world’s biggest ad business and OpenAI is building its own. Oldham’s answer is that owning both sides of the transaction, buyer and seller, makes the network smarter with every placement.