Gravity Raises $30.5M to Put Ads Inside AI Chatbots
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Gravity, which is based in San Francisco, California, has closed a $30.5 million Series A to expand the advertising business it is building inside conversational AI products. Lightspeed and Committed co-led the round, which takes the total raised by the company to $38.5 million.
The pitch is straightforward enough. Instead of buying space on a web page, brands buy text based placements that appear inside chatbots and assistants while a person is mid conversation. Best Buy and Target are among the advertisers already running through the system, and Gravity says its placements reach ChatGPT, Codebuff and Runable. Vercel and MongoDB also sit on its client list.
What sits underneath is a full stack advertising technology operation rather than a single product. Gravity runs a demand side platform for the advertisers, a supply side platform for the developers building AI applications, and an exchange in the middle that connects one to the other.
The size of the opportunity is what investors appear to be responding to. WPP Media estimates that marketers will spend $100 billion globally on advertising within generative AI search by 2030. OpenAI has forecast that its own advertising business will reach that same figure by then.
Gravity is already testing what comes after the chatbot ad. The company is trialling an agent to agent advertising product that no human user ever sees, feeding advertiser catalogues directly to AI agents at the point where those agents are making purchase decisions.