Gravity raises $30.5M to place ads inside AI chatbots

Gravity, an adtech startup that places ads within AI chatbots for brands like Best Buy and Target, has raised a $30.5 million Series A. Lightspeed Venture Partners and Committed Capital co-led the round, which brings the company's total funding to $38.5 million.

Gravity runs a full-stack ad platform: a demand-side platform for advertisers, a supply-side platform for AI app developers, and an exchange connecting the two. It places text-based ads within chatbots and assistants including ChatGPT, Codebuff, and Runable, and counts Vercel and MongoDB among its clients.

Cofounder Zach Oldham believes AI ads will become the world's largest advertising channel. WPP Media estimates marketers will spend $100 billion on ads within generative AI search globally by 2030; OpenAI forecasts its ad business alone will hit that figure by then.

Gravity is testing an "agent-to-agent" ad product that human users never see, feeding advertiser catalogues to AI agents making purchase decisions. It plans to add direct payment tools so agents can buy once a user approves.

Gravity is a small player in a crowded field. Google runs the world's biggest ad business, and OpenAI has already signed adtech partners including Adobe, StackAdapt, and Criteo.

As chatbots absorb queries once handled by search, advertisers and platforms are racing to build the ad infrastructure for AI. Gravity is betting that owning both sides of a new AI-native ad market is the way to compete against incumbents. "Our network gets smarter every day that goes by," Oldham said.