Recently launched agentic ad tech platform pubX has acquired media quality and governance firm Compliant as it looks to accelerate its expansion into the US market.
The acquisition comes alongside a US$5 million Series A funding round led by Chicago Ventures, with the capital set to support pubX’s US expansion, growth of its demand-side business and further development of its agent-to-agent advertising infrastructure.
Launched last month, pubX describes itself as the emerging intersection of AI and programmatic advertising. The platform enables independent AI agents to plan, buy, sell and optimise advertising on behalf of advertisers and publishers.
The acquisition of Compliant brings together expertise from both sides of the advertising market, combining pubX’s publisher technology with Compliant’s media quality and governance signals.
The two companies say the combination is designed to support direct trading between buyer and seller agents, with Compliant’s quality signals incorporated into the decisions made by pubX’s agents.
pubX began on the publisher side, spending years helping publishers price and sell their inventory, while Compliant has primarily focused on the demand side, working with global brands and agencies.
Compliant was founded by former Unilever and P&G executives and has developed products including the Data Integrity and CTV Quality Indexes, designed to help advertisers assess the quality of media inventory.
Andrew Mole, CEO and co-founder of pubX, said the company was effectively looking to take programmatic advertising to its next stage.
“Programmatic took this industry from fax machines and spreadsheets into more automated and real-time platforms in two short decades, and everything we’ve done since builds on that premise,” Mole said.
“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.
“For the first time, the infrastructure has caught up with what brands want to achieve with their advertising and how publishers want to sell.”
The platform is built on the open Ad Context Protocol (AdCP), with pubX developing agents that can operate across the buying and selling process.
According to the company, agents are governed by checks on every buy, with decisions designed to be reasoned, traced and auditable. Compliant’s media quality signals will now form part of the information considered by agents before a purchase is made.
The company said advertisers remain in control of the process, with clients able to set the level of autonomy, establish their own brand and commercial rules and approve plans at key stages before agents execute them.
Compliant will retain its name and operate as a pubX company, with CEO Jamie Barnard taking on the additional role of president, global demand growth.
Barnard will lead pubX’s global growth strategy across agencies, advertisers and the wider buy-side.
“For years, brands have searched for high-quality, high-performing inventory with real, relevant and engaged audiences. Compliant built the Data Integrity and CTV Quality Indexes so that they could do that with certainty rather than speculation,” Barnard said.
“Inside pubX, those media quality and governance signals sit in the decision itself, so an agent weighs them before it buys. This is what gives each CMO the confidence to trust pubX’s agents.”
pubX launched in APAC earlier this year under the leadership of Takami Kowalski, with Andrew Gilbert appointed to head its Australian operations in September.
The company said the US$5 million Series A will fund its expansion in the United States, the build-out of its demand-side business serving brands and agencies, continued development of its buyer and seller agents on AdCP, and the integration of Compliant’s signals across the platform.
Stuart Larkins, co-founder and general partner at Chicago Ventures, said the company was taking a different approach to the development of agentic advertising technology.
“Every part of the advertising industry is asking how agents will improve buying and selling, and most answers so far are an agentic layer built on existing infrastructure,” Larkins said.
“Co-founders Andrew Mole and Alex Rosen, pubX’s CTO, have built advertising infrastructure before, and this time they built it for agents from the start, on both sides of the transaction, with a publisher base that already trusts them and a design that keeps the client in control.
“That is a rare starting position, and the Compliant acquisition makes it stronger.”
