ZeroClick

ZeroClick is a reasoning-time ad network designed to integrate advertising into artificial intelligence platforms. The company was founded by Ryan Hudson, who previously founded Honey and sold it to PayPal for $4 billion. In August 2025, ZeroClick announced it had raised $55 million in funding from a group of investors including Anthos, Ludlow, Anfa, Wonder, Protagonist, and Hudson himself. This same investor group had previously backed Hudson's successful venture with Honey.

The company's core service provides a new way for brands to connect with customers through AI assistants. Instead of traditional, interruptive ads, ZeroClick's platform allows advertisers to provide contextual information that is woven into the AI's reasoning process as it formulates answers for users. This model, termed "reasoning-time" advertising, analyzes the context of user interactions with AI and inserts relevant, paid advertiser content directly into the dialogue. The platform's "Add Units" are created by converting advertisers' landing pages or Google Ads data into a format optimized for large language models.

ZeroClick's business model aims to solve the monetization challenge for AI developers who face high operational costs. By integrating the ZeroClick SDK, AI developers can monetize their services without relying on user subscriptions, offering an ad-supported free tier. The platform operates by detecting user intent, creating a privacy-safe summary, matching it with competing brand campaigns, and then allowing the AI to weave the winning brand's context into its response if it adds value. The company provides advertisers with full-funnel analytics to track performance from consideration to conversion. ZeroClick already connects over 10,000 advertisers with users through its internally developed products and is now expanding its capabilities to third-party AI developers and platforms.

Keywords: reasoning-time advertising, AI ad network, contextual advertising, AI monetization, native AI ads, Ryan Hudson, in-AI advertising, ad-supported AI, LLM monetization, Add Units, contextual weaving, affiliate marketing AI, AI advertising platform, text-based creative optimization, AI developers, answer enrichment, plug-and-play monetization, full-funnel analytics, response enrichment, real-time context matching