Published on: October 7, 2026
Recently launched agentic advertising technology platform pubX has acquired media quality and governance company Compliant as it prepares to expand its presence in the US market.
The acquisition follows a US$5 million Series A funding round led by Chicago Ventures. The investment will support pubX’s US expansion, strengthen its demand-side business and accelerate the development of its agent-to-agent advertising infrastructure.
Positioning itself at the intersection of artificial intelligence and programmatic advertising, pubX enables independent AI agents to plan, transact and optimise advertising campaigns for both advertisers and publishers.
The acquisition brings together pubX’s publisher-focused technology with Compliant’s expertise in media quality, governance and demand-side advertising. The companies said the combined platform will enable more direct trading between buyer and seller agents, with Compliant’s media quality signals incorporated into pubX’s agent decision-making.
pubX initially built its business around helping publishers price and commercialise advertising inventory, while Compliant has concentrated on the demand side, supporting global brands and agencies. Founded by former Unilever and P&G executives, Compliant has developed solutions including its Data Integrity and CTV Quality Indexes to help advertisers evaluate the quality of media inventory.
Andrew Mole, CEO and Co-founder of pubX, said the platform represents the next stage in the evolution of programmatic advertising.
“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.”
pubX’s technology is built on the open Ad Context Protocol (AdCP), allowing its agents to participate across different stages of the advertising buying and selling process.
The company said each transaction is subject to governance checks, with agent decisions designed to be reasoned, traceable and auditable. Following the acquisition, Compliant’s media quality signals will become part of the information evaluated by pubX agents before advertising purchases are executed.
Advertisers will continue to control how much autonomy agents have within the process. Clients can establish brand and commercial parameters, determine approval points and sign off on plans before agents proceed with execution.
Compliant will continue operating under its existing name as a pubX company. Its CEO Jamie Barnard will also become president, global demand growth, taking responsibility for pubX’s international growth strategy across agencies, advertisers and the broader buy-side market.
“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 Takami Kowalski, while Andrew Gilbert was appointed to lead the company’s Australian operations in September.
The company said the new funding will be used to establish and grow its US operations, expand its demand-side offering for brands and agencies, continue developing buyer and seller agents on AdCP, and integrate Compliant’s quality signals throughout its platform.
Stuart Larkins, co-founder and general partner at Chicago Ventures, said pubX is taking a distinct approach to building technology for agentic advertising.
“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.
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