AI adtech startup hopes to eventually parlay its $30.5-million USD Series A into a Canadian office.
There’s an odd transition period when you move away from home where it’s sometimes not clear where “home” really is.
Zach Oldham is still in that “weird in-between” phase: he was born in London, England, raised as a teenager in Vancouver, and now runs his own AI adtech company, Gravity, in San Francisco. Because of that, the 23-year-old has a tough time answering where he considers “home” to be.
“I would have loved to stay in Vancouver if what exists in San Francisco was available in Canada.”
Zach Oldham,
Gravity
“There’s a point where I visited Vancouver, and I was like, ‘oh, San Francisco feels more like home,’” Oldham told BetaKit in an interview. “It’s like being between girlfriends … Vancouver still feels like home, but at the same time, San Francisco is becoming home.”
Wherever his home is now, Oldham hopes to one day give back to the Canadian city that raised him. He says he would eventually like to open a Gravity office in Vancouver, but that the company has to grow a lot more first.
The startup is fresh off a $30.5-million USD ($42 million CAD) Series A round, co-led by Lightspeed Venture Partners and Committed Capital. Oldham said the proceeds will help the company make more AI models free to use, with ads.
Gravity is an ad network for AI, connecting businesses with AI chatbot providers for sponsorship opportunities. When a business buys an ad through Gravity, its system does the backend work to make that business appear in relevant search queries. The ads are clearly marked “sponsored” in the AI’s output, much like how a Google search shows sponsored results.
“The last thing that we’re interested in is biasing or modifying responses,” Oldham said. “I think that it’s very important with this type of advertising that you can prove that you’re not manipulating an LLM’s response.”
So far, Gravity works with models from major players like OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google, and counts Walmart, Vercel, and ElevenLabs among its business customers. Oldham wants Gravity’s ad network to help AI become more accessible to everyone, because he thinks it’s “genuinely a useful and transformative technology” that needs to reckon with its high costs as more AI-powered apps become available.
“You need a business model that actually works and can deliver,” Oldham said. “I don’t think that we’re going to see people spending 50 bucks a month, 100 bucks a month, on 20 different tools.”
The idea for Gravity formed while Oldham and his co-founder Leo Martinez were still between Vancouver and San Francisco, but they ultimately decided to build in San Francisco for the sake of the company. Oldham said that Canada has “excellent resources” when it comes to education, but noted it competes with a much larger market directly south of the border. On top of that, San Francisco is “ridiculously optimistic” about entrepreneurship, a cultural feature that Oldham said doesn’t exist in Canada in the same way. One of Oldham’s Canadian angel investors, Ian Crosby, expressed a similar sentiment when he launched his AI accounting startup Synthetic in San Francisco earlier this year.
RELATED: Gumloop sticks $50-million USD Series B round to let employees build their own AI agents
Still, Oldham holds onto his Vancouver address and hopes that one day he can help Canada grow its tech ecosystem. While he thinks Shopify is “quite admirable” for growing into a global tech giant from Eastern Canada, Oldham hopes to eventually play a role in giving Western Canada its own boost, in the same way Vancouver-founded, San Francisco-based Gumloop did with its recently opened Vancouver office.
“We’re going to require more than two companies to establish themselves, and probably some more work from Canada as a whole, if we’re going to cultivate the right ecosystem for companies to be able to stay in the first place,” Oldham said. “I would have loved to stay in Vancouver if what exists in San Francisco was available in Canada; I probably would have registered the business in Canada itself.”
Feature image courtesy Unsplash. Photo by Zulfugar Karimov.